This interview with lawyer-blogger Liu Xiaoyuan was shot by Danwei.org in November.
Liu writes today that he is being forced by the Haidian District Justice Bureau to shut down his law firm for six months. This means, he says, that he and all of the lawyers who work at his firm are "unemployed for six months."
As Global Voices Advocacy explains, the official reason for disciplinary action against his Yi Tong Law Firm is that the firm employed a lawyer who does not have a license to practice law. As Liu explains, Li Subin, the employee in question, was working as a legal assistant, not as a full lawyer. Li had his license suspended after accusing the Henan Justice Bureau of charging excessive lawyer registration fees back in 2001.
The real reason for the punishment, Liu believes, is that lawyers in his firm had petitioned last year for direct elections of the leadership of the Beijing Lawyers Association. He says the goal is to drive his lawyers to flee to other firms and cause the Yi Tong law firm to fail. He points out that this is the same tactic used against civil rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng. This is non-trivial, given that Gao went on to be tortured, spoke out about it, and has now disappeared.
I have written about Liu in the past here and here.
Liu is a prolific blogger and defense lawyer who writes passionately about the cases he is involved with and other cases he follows. He has not shied away from controversy in the past couple of years. Perhaps most controversially, he represented family members of Yang Jia, the confessed cop killer, arguing on his blog that while the defendant may have been guilty he was not afforded due process under Chinese law. He called attention to various shenanigans pulled by the prosecution around the time of the trial, such as the illegal detention of Yang Jia's mother in a mental institution. Public sympathy for Yang Jia was widespread - discussion of the case around the Chinese Internet was arguably more widespread than, say, Charter 08 and also potentially much more threatening to the regime in the immediate term.
Here's how I described Liu after meeting him in the Fall of 2007:
Liu's office is a dusty low-rent affair in a rabbit-warren of offices inside a hotel, inside a shopping center across from Beijing's West Train Station. Liu is the classic pulblic-defender type who you can find in many countries: dogged, determined, believing fervently in everybody's right to legal defense and a their day in court. China has a constitution and a legal system and he takes them both seriously - along with the rights that they are supposed to grant China's citizens. He defends people accused of all kinds of crimes who don't have connections or resources to hire fancy lawyers. He says a foreign journalist recently asked him why, as a Communist Party member, he was defending people accused of theft or murder. He says there is no conflict: after all he is serving the people, isn't he?
Liu is obsessed with the law, with justice, with the legal process. He is so obsessed, in fact, that he writes about these topics on over a dozen blog-hosting services - and says he posts to about six of his blogs nearly every day. All of his blogs, he says, have censored his postings at various times. But they all censor his writings differently...
Liu supporters in the blogosphere are pretty darn unhappy about the latest effort to "harmonize" him not just virtually, but in the "real" world. Ai Weiwei writes:
What kind of person is afraid of this kind of man? Only those people who inhabit the dark corners of the legal system, who don't want to see the common folk win, those people who are aided by evil forces, those people who want China to forever belong to a small minority, people to whom you cannot speak reason.
Speaking out for Liu Xiaoyuan is speaking out for everybody. When we have justice we won't need others to speak out for us. We must protect those who seek justice just as our great nation cherishes CCTV, or otherwise there won't be anybody left to speak up for you.
In a scathing essay Ruan Yunfei concludes:
Brother Xie Yong has said of the post 1949 regime: "Whoever is right should be ignored." We can imitate his words to say of today's regime: "Whoever doesn't obey is dealt with." That is the picture of the conditions Chinese people are living under today.
A blogger called dafengqixi points to Liu's situation as part of a long list of reasons why the regime is bankrupt, starting his post by saying:
Mark Twain once wrote that some people in the U.S. congress were raised by whores. Well he didn't know that some Chinese officials raise whores, while others are raised by whores...
...and he rolls on from there.. ouch..
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