On the afternoon of April 13, 2023, they would be received by the ambassador of the European Union (EU) in China, Jorge Toledo, and another European diplomat. But, while they were on their way, the couple was taken out of the subway in Beijing, the city where they live, by plainclothes officers. Yu Wensheng, a respected lawyer who had previously spent four years in prison for defending other Chinese human rights activists and calling for constitutional reforms, was released in March 2022. His wife, Xu Yan, had continued fighting for him throughout this period. . “They took us”writes Mr. Yu in X with a photo showing him in front of a man in a cap and mask. Xu Yan filmed the scene.
For the simple fact of having accepted the invitation to meet with European diplomats, the couple was sentenced, on Tuesday, October 29, to three years in prison for him, one year and nine months for her, according to the website Weiquanwang (network of protection of rights). The initial charges of “provoking a riot” were reclassified by the Suzhou court of justice, where they were tried, a thousand kilometers from their home, for a much more serious charge: “incitement to subversion of state power.” Diplomats from a dozen countries were prevented from attending the trial, which took place at the end of August. The European Union said “dismayed” for the news of his conviction.
chilling effect
Mr. Yu received, in 2018, the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and Rule of Law and, in 2021, the Martin-Ennals Prize for rights defenders. The couple’s detention has, for a year, had a chilling effect, especially for foreign embassies faced with the new reality that a simple encounter with them could send a Chinese rights advocate to prison.
Yu Wensheng has distinguished himself in the past by daring to address the case of the Chinese who showed their support for the Occupy Central movement, in Hong Kong, in 2014, and then defended some of his colleagues arrested during the so-called “709” crackdown, on July 9, 2015 (i.e. “7/09”, the Chinese write the dates with the months on the left), when hundreds of lawyers were detained. Yu Wensheng could then have gone abroad, but he decided to stay to continue this work. In December 2023, the NGO Amnesty International learned that his wife, Xu Yan, had lost fourteen kilos during her detention, that her guards, despite the winter, gave her fewer blankets than the other detainees, who mistreated her, and that she suffered of being forced to sit in the same position for hours on end.
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