By Jerome A. Cohen

The excellent Radio Free Asia report, Chinese Lawyer Withdraws Appeal Against Disciplinary Sanction, gives valuable insight into how the Chinese Communist Party’s suppression of speech hinders the fight against Covid-19. The woman lawyer suppressed in this instance was not a conventional human rights lawyer but an idealistic general lawyer trying to expose the government’s mishandling of the health crisis. She would surely have been disbarred from practice, as another local lawyer was, had she been more energetic in seeking and revealing virus-related information or more resistant to the professional institutions that sought to stifle her.

The CHRD report cited by RFA is very important since it gives details about how thousands of people have been persecuted by the Ministry of Public Security for allegedly disseminating “false and harmful information”. CHRD itself has documented roughly 900 cases of persons recently sanctioned by the public security forces for “spreading misinformation” or ”disturbing public order” regarding the epidemic. Almost 20% were sent to police detention for up to 15 days, a process that, under the “Public Order Administration Punishment Act”, requires no participation by defense lawyers or any court. Conditions in police detention cells are often appallingly overcrowded, coercive and unsanitary.

The RFA report also gives keen insight into the plight of Chinese lawyers who try to speak out. Their law firm is pressed by the Lawyers Association and the official Judicial Bureau to stop them or fire them. If the firm fails to take sufficient action to suppress its lawyer, it will be closed down by the Bureau, and the lawyer will be disbarred and even jailed. It is notable that the courageous lawyer involved in this case, Ms. Liu Yingying, was coerced into abandoning her appeal against the reprimand she had received from the Lawyers Association for posting “inappropriate comments” and had to admit her mistake, delete her post and reflect sincerely on her error. That was why the Lawyers Association, which is supposed to protect the rights of lawyers, said it would treat her leniently!