ICC NOTE: New protests emerge among Chinese activists calling for the release of at least 19 known rights activists and lawyers who have been arrested for subverting the state. In most cases, human rights and Christian lawyers are arrested for their opposition to China’s whitewashing of Christianity. From July 2015 to mid February of 2016, an estimated 317 lawyers and other rights activists have been questioned, arrested, barred from travel, and even gone missing for doing nothing but their jobs in exposing the truth. Many Christian lawyers and other rights lawyers have defended church groups and leaders alike from the oppressive rule of the Communist Party. 

3/3/2016 China (Radio Free Asia) – More than 200 lawyers and rights activists across China have signed an open letter to the country’s parliament, which opens its annual session in Beijing this week, calling for the immediate release of 19 human rights lawyers held in a nationwide police operation since last July.

“To date, 19 lawyers, law firm staff or rights activists have been formally and obviously arrested,” said the letter, addressed to the National People’s Congress (NPC).

“None of those arrested or held under residential surveillance have been allowed visits from their relatives or their lawyers,” it added.

The letter said: “These lawyers were brave enough to take on sensitive cases and to fight them using rational argument, with respect and a sense of justice.”

“Because of this, they won the trust and support of large numbers of people trying to protect their rights, and because of this they were charged with subversion, or incitement to subvert state power, and even had their names smeared by reports in the People’s Daily and Xinhua news agency,” it said.

The letter called for the immediate and unconditional release of all detained in the crackdown, which began with the detention of rights lawyer Wang Yu, her husband Bao Longjun and colleagues at the Beijing Fengrui law firm on the night of July 9, 2015.

Shanghai-based signatory Wang Jianhua said he signed because he believes the detained lawyers have done nothing wrong.

“I think these lawyers are on the side of justice, because they spoke the truth,” Wang said. “The whole point of a lawyer is to help their clients, [not the government].”

“This government won’t tolerate any kind of dissent,” he said. “The lawyers are innocent, and they should practice what the preach when it comes to the rule of law, which doesn’t exist here at all.”

“I think they should release the whole lot of them.”

From July 9 through Feb. 19, at least 317 lawyers, law firm staff, human right activists and family members have been questioned, summoned, forbidden to leave the country, held under house arrest and residential surveillance, criminally detained, placed under formal arrest or have simply gone missing, the Hong Kong-based Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group said in a statement on its website.

Most have since been released, but 19 face subversion-related charges, while nine are on “bail,” one is under house arrest, and 33 have been slapped with travel bans, it said.

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