The U.N. human rights chief on Tuesday called on China to immediately release all lawyers it has in detention, after raising concerns with Chinese authorities over a crackdown against government critics, legal experts and advocacy groups in recent months.<\/p>\n
GENEVA \u2014 The U.N. human rights chief on Tuesday called on China to immediately release all lawyers it has in detention, after raising concerns with Chinese authorities over a crackdown against government critics, legal experts and advocacy groups in recent months.<\/p>\n
Zeid Raad al-Hussein pointed to a \u201cworrying pattern\u201d in China, and noted that states have a duty to protect lawyers, journalists, members of non-governmental groups and other parts of civil society that do \u201cimportant work\u201d in the country.<\/p>\n
The office of Zeid, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement that police have detained about 250 human rights lawyers, legal assistants and activists since July, though many have since been released.<\/p>\n
\u201cLawyers should never have to suffer prosecution or any other kind of sanctions or intimidation for discharging their professional duties,\u201d Zeid said. \u201cI urge the government of China to release all of them immediately and without conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for Zeid\u2019s office, said it has had a \u201cconstant stream of communications on these issues\u201d with China over the last few months \u2014 mainly through China\u2019s mission in Geneva \u2014 including a response received from the Chinese government over the weekend.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt suggested, basically, that all the people we raise concerns about were guilty of criminal activities,\u201d Colville said in summarizing the Chinese response letter, which he declined to provide to a reporter. \u201cIt\u2019s a kind of reflexive response, which doesn\u2019t really address the core issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the statement, Zeid also expressed concern about recent disappearances of booksellers from Hong Kong, and noted that leading human rights lawyers Li Heping and Wang Yu are among those who face a \u201csubversion of state power\u201d charge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The U.N. human rights chief on Tuesday called on China to immediately release all lawyers it has in detention, after raising concerns with Chinese authorities over a crackdown against government critics, legal experts and advocacy groups in recent months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-2473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=2473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}