By Jerome A. Cohen
Human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi
The title of this latest valuable message from IAPL Monitoring, “Rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi remains under police investigation,” sounds much too innocuous to encapsulate what is taking place. “Remains under police investigation” does not do justice to the gross injustice being perpetrated by the Linyi Public Security Bureau (PSB), the PSB that so abused the blind “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng in so many ways from 2005 until his extraordinary escape in 2012.
Human rights lawyer Ding has been held incommunicado for almost one year since his detention following the small HR lawyers meeting last December in Xiamen. If the experience of so many others is a guide, he is undoubtedly being subjected to tortures of various kinds.
What is interesting about this latest sad report of the plight of “disappeared lawyers” is the apparent refusal of the local procuracy to accept the PSB’s recommendation for prosecution on two occasions, presumably because the police are not deemed to have made out the case for “inciting subversion of state power”. In these circumstances Ding should be released free and clear or at least granted the PRC equivalent of “bail” if there is need for the investigation to continue.
The PSB rejects this proper course and continues to try again. The procuracy should order the PSB to at least grant the defense lawyer’s request for bail. Yet, in order to avoid embarrassment and accountability for the police and to avoid sanctions against the procuracy itself, it continues to send the case back for more evidence. The procuracy is caught in a dilemma, trying to do its duty to carry out the legal protections prescribed in the PRC Criminal Procedure Law to prevent an unjustifiable indictment and yet not run afoul of the Communist Party’s insistence that the police, procuracy and courts operate as “a single fist” in such cases.
I assume the Linyi City Party Political-Legal Committee will resolve the problem since, legally, the procuracy cannot continue at this point to keep sending the request for prosecution back to the police for further “investigation”.
DING’S LAWYERS GROUP WAS A MODERATE CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATION. If I were a Hong Kong lawyer working for civic, political and legal reforms, I would take note of the Mainland precedents and be very worried about Hong Kong’s deteriorating constitutional prospects and my own future. For example, Dennis Kwok, the able and dynamic lawyer representing the Hong Kong legal profession in the Legislative Council until his Wednesday ouster by the NPCSC, intends to return to law practice and continue, as a citizen as well as a barrister, his opposition to the new National Security Law. Should he be prepared for detention and “investigation” for alleged “inciting subversion against state power”? Now that the Mainland security organizations have come to dominate HK, will he be subjected to the same incommunicado “investigation” procedures and punishments as Mainland lawyer Ding?