*** Welcome to piglix ***

Wang Yu (lawyer)


Wang Yu (born 1 May 1971) is a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer. She was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2015 when China initiated a crackdown against human rights attorneys, not unlike a 2011 crackdown in China, only four years earlier. Ms. Wang was charged with inciting subversion of state power which is a serious offense in China carrying a life sentence. Wang is a lawyer with the Fengrui law firm in Beijing. That law firm has been targeted by the government in its crackdown, which arrested two lawyers and one intern there in addition to Wang and her husband, Bao Longjun. Late in 2016, Chinese authorities released Wang Yu on bail after she was in all likelihood coerced to give a televised confession in which she denounced her colleagues and suggested that her human rights work was the result of foreign activists out to smear China. “I won’t be used by them anymore,” Ms. Wang said in a video published on a Communist Party news site. Her confession followed a pattern similar to those given to Chinese authorities by other lawyers, publishers and human rights activists. Friends said that although released from detention, Ms. Wang would still remain under surveillance by Chinese authorities for years and would not be free to come and go as she pleases.

Before her conversion to a human rights lawyer, Wang Yu was a commercial lawyer until an incident at a Tianjin train station in 2008. At that time she got into an argument with rail employees because she was denied entry onto a train even though she had a ticket. In a Kafkaesque turn of events, she was charged with "intentional assault" and was imprisoned for more than 2 years. While in prison, she learned how prisoners were mistreated and tortured. When she was released in 2011, her conversion to a human rights lawyer was complete.

Since then, she became part of China's human rights movement. Her clients have included Ilham Tohti, a well-known Uyghur intellectual, the women’s rights group known as the "Feminists Five," and the banned Falun Gong spiritual group. It was her use of social media to champion her causes that eventually led to her arrest on the subversion charges. In 2015, the government's Xinhua News Agency published a piece designed to tarnish her reputation, saying, "This arrogant woman with a criminal record turned overnight to a lawyer, blabbering about the rule of law, human rights, and justice, and roaming around under the flag of 'rights defense.'"


...
Wikipedia

...