China Court Postpones Trial of Blind Activist Against Forced Abortions

by Steven Ertelt - LifeNews.com Editor - July 20, 2006

Linyi, China (LifeNews.com) -- A Chinese court on Thursday postponed the trial of a blind activist who, along with his family, has been subject to brutality and imprisonment for his international campaign against forced abortions.

Chen Guangcheng has been harassed by local Chinese officials in the eastern city of Linyi since he exposed a brutal family planning campaign.

The local court said prosecutors sought to postpone the case against Chen, his attorney Li Jingsong said. A new date for the trial has not been set.

The Associated Press spoke to a representative of Shandong's Yinan County Intermediate Court who wouldn't give his name but confirmed the trial had been delayed.

Li, a member of a legal team of a dozen attorneys trying to help Chen, told AP that he visited the activist on Wednesday at a detention center where local officials are holding him.

"He seemed to be in pretty good shape physically and mentally," Li said.

The trial comes after Chen exposed a family planning campaign that involved officials forcing as many as 10,000 women to submit to abortions or sterilizations. Chen brought international attention to the travesty with interviews in the Washington Post and Time magazine.

Anyone who attempted to flee the brutality was apprehended, beaten, and held hostage in city prisons until their relatives came forward and paid large fines for their release.

As a result of his actions, Chen was beaten and jailed, his family forced under house arrest, and attorneys and supporters who have been helping him have been assaulted.

Attorneys say the Chinese government is turning a blind eye because it often allows local governments great leeway in putting down political unrest. They also say leading Chinese officials have been lied to about Chen's situation.

"They're afraid of information getting out," Li, who has received deaths threats, said of Linyi officials. "They don't want the leadership in Beijing to know the truth about what's happening there."

Linyi officials have persuaded some top Chinese leaders that Chen's efforts are supported by overseas groups and they successfully lobbied the Foreign Ministry and the powerful Propaganda Department to ban any discussion of Chen's case in the state media or on the Internet.

Li has only been allowed to meet with Chen once and was prohibited from discussing the case with him.

Chen and his wife and 70 year-old mother were under house arrest beginning in September last year. The officials cut his telephone lines and used specialized equipment to prevent him from using his cell phone.

After the house arrest ended, Chen, and others who were helping him file a class action lawsuit against Linyi officials, protested his treatment. Linyi police arrested him and indicted him under the faked charges.

He has been detained at an undisclosed location ever since and Linyi police have placed Chen's mother, wife and child under house arrest.

"There isn't much hope," said Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, told the Washington Post via telephone from their home recently.

"Everything that has happened runs counter to Hu Jintao's talk of democracy and governing by law. We live in a nation without law, a nation without morality," she explained.

Top U.S. officials have pressed the Chinese government to release Chen, but national officials have not intervened. Linyi officials, in late May, prevented two senior U.S. diplomats from trying to visit Yuan.

ACTION: Contact China's embassy in the United States and encourage officials there to help Chen Guangcheng. You can find contact information at http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/sgxx/dfzygy/t44338.htm

Related stories:
Family of China Activist Against Force Abortions Abducted, Lawyers Meet Chen - http://www.LifeNews.com/nat2396.html
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Also, check out:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1186887,00.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/26/AR2005082601756.html

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:yuE8lEyFwRQJ:hrw.org/english/docs/2006/07/18/china13766.htm+Chen+Guangcheng&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=6


Blind rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who was detained in Beijing on Sept 6, 2005.
Photo: Gongmin Weiquan Wang.
www.gmwq.org

HONG KONG— September 8, 2005 :Chinese rights activist Chen Guangcheng has described being grabbed and forced into the back of a vehicle by unidentified men, taken to a hotel, and threatened with spying charges because he revealed abuses of rural women in the name of family planning policy.

Chen, who is blind, described being detained in Beijing by officials from his home city of Linyi, in the eastern province of Shandong, after fleeing to the capital to escape surveillance and threats at his home.

“They dragged me into the car, and my legs were hurt in quite a few places. Some of them pulled my hair and banged my head onto the wheel and hit my face and head. My nose still has two places which are hurt,” Chen, 34, told RFA’s Mandarin service.

“Then I was trying to shout, but one of them squeezed my neck with his arm, stopping me from shouting out,” he told RFA reporter Ding Xiao. “At that moment, I didn’t even dare to swallow. About twice I passed out.”


Requests for doctor denied

Chen said his requests for medical attention were refused, and he was taken to a hotel and visited the next morning by the head of the Linyi public security bureau and the city’s deputy mayor.

“The main purpose was to threaten me. He said, ‘You have revealed news information to foreign media and have been suspected of violating Article 111 of Chinese criminal law: illegally providing intelligence to foreign countries, for which the maximum sentence is life in prison. The minimum you can get is 5-10 years.’”
Officials then called in his family to persuade him to give up his activism.

“But then—I don’t know why—at a little after 6 o’clock in the evening, [they] abruptly let me go,” Chen told RFA.

The deputy mayor said the reason for Chen’s abduction was to protect him from “being used by the foreign media.”

“They don’t care about what the truth is. They just won’t allow any reporting. I think this is an issue of freedom of speech,” Chen said.

Family planning abuses“

But if what you say is true, no matter where you say it, it’s still the truth.”
Chen was becoming widely known for exposing violence against women by Linyi municipal authorities in pursuit of family planning targets under China’s one-child policy, with his work against forced abortions and sterilizations featured in the Washington Post last month.

His writings, which blew the whistle of the use of forced abortions and other abuses in Linyi city and his home county of Yinan, were widely distributed on the Internet and read by many in China.

Chen was detained in Beijing Sept. 7. His lawyer Teng Biao called the police to report his disappearance, and was told that the “kidnappers” were police officers from Linyi city. “They didn’t show any identification, and they didn’t enter into any legal process,” Teng said.

A Chinese grass-roots advocacy group, the Chinese Rights Defenders (CRD), said his detention was illegal.

Calls for an investigation

“The CRD condemns Shandong public security’s actions in violating the relevant articles in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, and Chinese criminal law, which pledge to protect Chinese citizens’ basic human rights,” the group said in a statement carried on its Web site.

“CRD demands the immediate release of Mr. Chen Guangcheng and requests an investigation by the Ministry of Public Security, seeking accountability for the unlawful kidnapping and mistreatment of Mr. Chen,” said the group.

Chen’s lawyer Teng Biao called the Beijing police after Chen was seized. He told RFA’s Cantonese service: “They didn’t produce any identification, nor did they enter into any legal process.”

Teng said the Linyi municipal authorities sent people after Chen once they realized he had slipped through a security cordon outside his house and arrived in Beijing.
Chen’s wife, Yuan Weijing, said the Linyi municipal government had lured Chen out of his hiding place by persuading her father he could help the situation.

“They are now near our family home watching us,” Yuan told RFA’s Cantonese service Wednesday. “There are police vehicles and seven or eight officers. There are also officials from our local county government. They are there round the clock, and they change shifts every six hours.”

An official who answered the telephone at the Yinan county public security bureau near Chen’s home said he didn’t know anything about the situation.

Original reporting in Cantonese by Lillian Cheung and in Mandarin by Ding Xiao. RFA Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. RFA Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:Wrj1jeBWDQkJ:www.rfa.org