ICC Note:

Human Rights Watch has reported that Christian human rights lawyer and activist Li Heping, who was supposed to have been released by now, has still not been released by the Chinese government. On April 28th, in a secret trial, he was given a suspended jail sentence for trumped up charges such as “subversion of state power.” Li’s family was not at the verdict announcement since they were not told of it, neither was the lawyer he was forced to fire. Li’s government-assigned lawyer traveled to Beijing to try to pressure his wife to travel to Tianjin. She is refusing to leave her home, which is under constant watch by officials, because she is afraid she will be detained and kept under house arrest with Li.

5/3/2017 China (Human Rights Watch) – The politically motivated case against prominent Chinese human rights lawyer Li Heping has reached a new low. On April 28, a court in Tianjin found Li guilty of “subversion of state power” and handed him a three-year suspended sentence. But the real kicker is that despite the suspended sentence, the authorities haven’t released Li, nor said where he is and when they plan to do so.

Li allegedly “used foreign funding” to “attempt to instigate discontent towards [China’s] social system among some people who do not know the facts.” It is not clear what funds the court was referring to, but shrewd netizens quickly noted the court’s hypocrisy – a 2015 Supreme Court report in which the court boasted of having received funding from the British government for rule of law research. “How come you people are not subverting state power?” human rights lawyer Zhang Lei asked.

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