Access to Justice

Updated March 6: The South China Morning Post and Reporters Without Borders report that the Shanghai Justice Bureau has upheld its decision to suspend the law license of defense lawyer Guo Guoting. The Bureau reportedly accused Guo of "on several occasions adopting positions and making statements contrary to the law and the Constitution" and “defiling and slandering” the Communist Party and government. According to a report published last week by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Bureau issued a notice on February 23 suspending Guo’s license to practice law. A hearing to review the decision was held on March 4. Guo, who plans to appeal the ruling, reportedly stated that the suspension was “unjustified official punishment.” Earlier, Guo told reporters that the government was trying to silence him for defending other activists.

Several media sources have carried reports regarding the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissent in the run-up to the Fourth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party, which convened on September 16 and concluded on September 19:

Problems have arisen in China as employers turn increasingly to labor-service agencies (laodong fuwu) to find workers. In an article posted on the Ministry of Justice Web site, reporter Zhong Angang describes how these agencies serve as the middlemen or intermediate agencies in the labor relationship. They sign contracts directly with workers, collect wages and social security payments from the employers, pay wages to the workers, and deposit the social security payments in the relevant government office. Workers who use labor-service agencies include domestic servants, construction workers, coal miners, and white collar workers in such industries as banking and insurance.

The Southern Daily reported on June 22 that someone removed pages A35 and A36 from copies of the June 21 edition of its sister publication, the Southern Metropolitan Daily, that were distributed in the Da Gang township. These pages included an investigative article entitled "Township Government Levies Land in Violation of Regulations, Villagers Petition Government to Have it Returned," which reported that 1,147 people from the Long Gu village in Da Gang had petitioned for the return of approximately three acres of land that had been requisitioned by the township real estate development company.

The alleged victim of a Shaanxi man charged with murder last year turned up alive in a neighboring province, according to a report in the Financial Times. Police accused Yue Tuyuan of murder after an acquaintance of his disappeared last year and an unidentified body was found in a nearby river. During an interview with prosecutors, Yue claimed police tortured him into confessing the crime, but prosecutors claimed they had DNA evidence and Yue relented and repeated the confession. The charge was only dropped after the alleged victim was found, but police never informed Yue of that fact and charged him with fraud instead. A court convicted him of that crime.

A January sweep of vagrants and mentally ill persons in Ganzhou city, Jianxi province, left five people missing and presumed dead, reports the China Youth Daily. According to the report, as part of an official effort to clean up the city, Ganzhou city civil affairs and public security officials rounded up seven vagrants and local mental patients, gave them some food, then drove them to a remote part of a neighboring county at night. The officials left the seven by the roadside in harsh winter weather. Two of the vagrants found their way back to Ganzhou, but five others in the group, including two mentally ill people who lived in the town, were still missing nearly six months later. After an exhaustive search, their families presume they are dead.

The China Youth Daily (CYD) has published a commentary questioning the hiring of committees of legal scholars to produce "expert opinions" in criminal cases. Scholarly committees submit such opinions, which typically address both factual and legal issues in individual criminal cases, to courts adjudicating the cases. The CYD commentator concludes that courts should not accept such opinions for several reasons. First, scholars are authoritative and have influence, so the submission of expert opinions is in fact a form of interference with the independence of the court. Second, because defendants pay the experts, the opinions are not an objective research product. Third, the commentator notes that wealthy defendants tend to hire such scholarly committees and thus gain an unfair advantage.