A decade on from China’s biggest crackdown on human rights lawyers in modern history, lawyers and activists say that the Chinese Communist party’s control over the legal profession has tightened, making rights defense work next to impossible.
Hundreds of human rights lawyers have been targeted since the “709 incident”, a nationwide crackdown on lawyers and activists that started on 9 July 9, 2015. According to human rights groups and the U.S. government, about 300 people from the loose collective of a burgeoning rights defense movement, known as weiquan, were targeted in the round-up. At least 10 were convicted of crimes such as “subversion of state power” and given jail terms, while dozens more have been subjected to surveillance, harassment and the revocation of their professional licenses in the years since.
Modern China has never welcomed human rights lawyers. But in the relatively open years of the early 2000s, with the rise of the internet and China’s increasing desire for approval on the world stage, the space for civil society grew to a degree that is now almost unrecognizable. Lawyers scored wins for defendants in cases ranging from tainted baby milk formula scandals to the abuse of migrant workers.
Ten years on from the crackdown, human rights workers say that the suppression of independent lawyers has become more systematic, and less visible, than rounding up individuals. Those affected by the 709 incident describe living under conditions of harassment and surveillance, and are often blocked from leaving the country.
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