5 Women’s Rights Activists in China Are Being Held Illegally, Lawyers Say
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Version 0 of 1. BEIJING — Five women’s rights activists are being held illegally in Beijing because the police have failed to ask prosecutors to formally arrest them, the lawyers for three of them said on Wednesday. According to Chinese law, the police are generally required to file a request for a formal arrest to prosecutors within 30 days of detaining someone if they want to continue the detention, the lawyers said. In the case of the five women, the deadline for that was Tuesday. The lawyers checked with the prosecutor’s office in the Haidian district of Beijing, where the women are being held, and discovered no applications had been filed, they said. “Now it has become overtime detention,” said Yan Xin, a lawyer for Li Tingting, one of the five women. “The police have violated the law.” The lawyers had said earlier that the police were investigating the women on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge that can result in a multiyear prison sentence and that has been increasingly used by officials to silence dissenters. The five women were detained in a coordinated move by police officers in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou starting the evening of March 6. The women — Ms. Li, 25; Wu Rongrong, 30; Zheng Churan, 25; Wei Tingting, 26; and Wang Man, 33 — had been organizing peaceful nationwide protests that would have taken place around March 8, International Women’s Day, to denounce sexual harassment on public transportation. Those taking part in the campaign would have put stickers on subways and buses. Mr. Yan said that he had met Ms. Li at the Haidian Detention Center on Tuesday, and that she had told him the police had informed her they had filed formal arrest applications. But there is no evidence that that has happened, Mr. Yan said. He said that Ms. Li seemed to be doing fine, and that she had told him she was prepared for any possible course of action. The detention of the five women has ignited international criticism of China. Petitions have circulated widely online. Around the world, protesters have stood on streets wearing masks that have photographs of the women’s faces. On Monday, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former United States secretary of state who is exploring a presidential run, posted on Twitter: “The detention of women’s activists in #China must end. This is inexcusable.” Besides Mr. Yan, two other lawyers, Wang Qiushi and Liang Xiaojun, checked independently on Wednesday with the Haidian prosecutor’s office, known in China as the procuratorate, and found that the local police had not filed any applications for formal arrests, the lawyers said in telephone interviews. Mr. Yan said the law requires that the police file the applications specifically to the Haidian procuratorate since the women are being held in the Haidian Detention Center. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Wang visited Beijing No. 1 Municipal Procuratorate, which is on a higher administrative level than the Haidian office, to check whether any application had been filed there, he said. But he said he found there had been no filing. “Now we can say for sure the five women are being held illegally,” he said. Mr. Wang added that if the police had filed applications with a prosecutor’s office, then the police had the legal right to detain the suspects for another seven days while awaiting the prosecutor’s decision on whether to bring charges. Lawyers have said it is unclear why the women who were arrested in Guangzhou and Hangzhou last month also ended up at the Haidian Detention Center, which is in western Beijing. A person answering the telephone on Wednesday at the Haidian procuratorate said the office does not speak to reporters. A person at the Haidian police department declined to comment. |