Chinese Litigators, a Brave Breed in the Human Rights Frontier

A human rights attorney in China may sound as contradictory as a democracy convention in the middle of Tiananmen Square.

Yet there are close to 200,000 lawyers in a country that had banned this profession only until 1976, which is quite an accomplishment for a country with a regime as paranoid as the one calling the shots in Beijing.

Problem is too many lawyers bringing too many human rights cases are stepping on too many powerful toes among the ruling elite, who is starting to push back hard.

That's what this very interesting op-ed column in The New York Times by former US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh is saying:

Yet if lawyers now enjoy increasing independence, those who defend human rights are increasingly under attack, with legal restrictions impeding their ability to provide an effective defense, to champion causes that challenge local power, or to form independent bar associations.

This month alone has seen several devastating setbacks. On July 9, the Beijing Justice Bureau announced that it had canceled the licenses of 53 lawyers for allegedly failing to apply for re-registration. The disbarred lawyers were all involved in high-profile cases challenging local or central authorities: the Sanlu contaminated milk scandal; allegations of corruption in the construction of schools that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake; a challenge over government control of the official Beijing Bar Association; and an alphabet soup of human rights cases ranging from forced evictions of tenants and farmers to politically motivated prosecutions of dissidents and religious dissenters.

Thornburgh lists a number of cases and instances where Chinese lawyers are finding themselves on the receiving end of the regime's wrath.

This is a must read.