| Summary: | Lawyers are increasingly on the frontline of human rights activism in China as more and more people turn to the law to push for democracy and their basic rights. The government's response has been uncompromising. Lawyers are threatened with suspension, disbarment and even criminal punishment for taking up sensitive cases that represent an actual or potential challenge to the power of officials. Some have had their licenses to practice law suspended or revoked. Where threats fail, lawyers are labelled dissidents and targeted with state violence. They are placed under surveillance. They may be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned. Some are subjected to enforced disappearance. Very few, a few hundred out of a total of 204,000 lawyers, risk taking up human rights cases as a result. This report updates Amnesty International's Breaking the law: Crackdown on human rights lawyers and legal activists in China (ASA 17/042/2009) published in 2009. Focusing on new regulatory and policy instruments, the current report documents how the government exerts control over lawyers in three ways: first, by trying to rein in their behaviour through increasing demands to conform to party ideology; second, by using administrative procedures to discipline and stop lawyers and others who have taken on human rights cases; and third, by carrying out violent acts, illegal under China's own laws, against people who persist when all other forms of pressure on them have failed to end their human rights activism. The report also sets out the latest developments in the cases highlighted in the 2009 report, considers ways lawyers have challenged efforts to control them, and analyzes recent trends in the development of the rule of law and in patterns of repression. It provides some evidence of the impact that controls on human rights lawyers have had on citizens access to justice.
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