By Albert Ho2021-04-09T15:41:00+01:00
China always arbitrarily detains human rights lawyers, in extreme cases even holding them incommunicado, should the regime find that these lawyers interfered with the regime’s vested interests. This was shown in the notorious ‘709 Crackdown’ in 2015, during which several hundred human rights lawyers and defenders
were detained or harassed and some of them reported being tortured or ill-treated during detention.
What appears to be the recent practice to repress human rights lawyers, however, is the extensive use of review, revocation or suspension of legal practice licenses against these lawyers so as to paralyse their rights to practise, and thus directly smashing their rice bowls. Such ‘strategy’ could be dissected in a threefold manner as follows.