A month after their arrests, 12 Hongkongers held in a Shenzhen detention center have yet to meet lawyers appointed by their families and are instead represented by unknown state-appointed attorneys.

Their plight have come to resemble that of other criminal suspects in mainland China who have waded into politically sensitive issues.

In one instance, defendants in the Terminus 2049 activist project had also been given state-appointed lawyers, according to Chen Kun, one of the defendants' family members. That project was a crowdfunded endeavor which published censored material, such as the eviction of migrant workers in Beijing, for about two years before authorities cracked down on the project founders.

Chen said he tried to identify the state-appointed lawyer for his detained relative through online searches, in the hope of shaming the lawyer into dropping the case.

“Our efforts are to ensure that, even if the [defendants] can’t be rescued, at least there will be more transparency and public information. I’m worried that the 12 Hongkongers' cases will turn out like ours,” Chen said.

“I’ve seen too many cases of political persecution. There is not a single case where the silent cooperation of family members will lead to a good result — not one.”

The Hong Kong group was allegedly captured on Aug. 23 in mainland waters while trying to flee to Taiwan via speedboat. They were previously arrested for protest-related offenses, and are the first group of Hong Kong demonstrators detained by mainland Chinese authorities since the passage of the city’s national security law on June 30.

Human rights lawyer Lu Siwei tried to access one of the Hongkongers earlier this month at the Yantian District Detention Center in Shenzhen, but officials turned him away, claiming that his client had accepted state-appointed representation.

The Hongkongers' case also parallels that of the non-governmental organization Changsha Funeng, where three workers were charged with subversion in July last year. Families initially appointed six lawyers to represent the defendants, but authorities replaced them with state-appointed lawyers in March.

Shi Minglei, the wife of one of the Changsha Funeng defendants, told Apple Daily that they tried without success to get in touch with the new lawyers.

“We called their offices, and the front desk said it would pass on our messages, but we never heard back,” Shi said. “Once, we called a manager at the law office and he hung up in a hurry after we told them who we were.”

Shi was finally able to identify the state-appointed lawyers after bumping into them by chance outside the detention center, and taking photos of them and their car license plates. Her success was entirely coincidental, Shi admitted.

Based on information posted online by family members, Apple Daily tried to contact the state-appointed lawyers in the Terminus 2049 and Changsha Funeng cases. Calls to their mobile phone numbers were not picked up, and their staff said that the lawyers were not in the office.

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