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‘I was treated like a pig’, human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang blasts China for torture to extract confession

蘋果日報 2020/06/22 08:40


Chinese human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang said he was tortured during interrogation and forced by authorities to plead guilty, in his first face-to-face interview with Kyodo News since his release from prison in April.
The 44-year-old was among hundreds of lawyers and activists arrested for “subversion against the state” during a nationwide crackdown in 2015, also known as the 709 crackdown for the date it began.

Wang was found guilty and sentenced to four and a half years in jail, after being held incommunicado for three years. He was also deprived of political rights, including freedom of speech and the press, for five years.
After his release on April 5 this year, authorities had sent him to his hometown in Jinan - 250 miles south of Beijing - for quarantine. And it took a lot of efforts before he was finally able to reunite with his family in Beijing on April 27.
In his interview with Kyodo News, Wang broke silence for the first time about the torture he had endured during years of incarceration.
The prominent lawyer was beaten and kicked during interrogation. He was monitored by two armed police officers around the clock, who forbade him from rolling over in his sleep. He was once ordered to stand with his hands up for 15 hours, and when he dropped them, he was yelled at for being a “traitor”. He became so weak that he could stand for no more than several minutes, Wang recalled in tears.
After being slapped in the face for several hours straight, Wang was forced to sign an affidavit in which he admitted to accepting foreign funds and subverting state power.
“From my case, you could see how sloppy and arbitrary it [China’s judicial procedure] is,” Wang said. “It is not commoners or lawyers like us who are destroying the rule of law, but the law enforcers in the judiciary,” which include the public security officers, prosecutors and court authorities.
In a closed-door trial in December 2018, he was pressed down on the floor “like a pig” for shouting at the judge, “what do you mean by rule of law?” When he tried to file an appeal, the authorities threatened to extend his prison sentence to eight years.
The interview with Wang was conducted after China’s top legislature approved a resolution to impose a national security law on Hong Kong. Once the law is enforced, anyone who criticizes Beijing in Hong Kong may be accused of sedition or collusion with foreign forces, Kyodo News reported.
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