A disbarred Chinese human rights lawyer has been forced to move 13 times in two months as part of a pattern of harassment against him and three other prominent rights advocates in Beijing that is further squeezing the country’s battered civil rights community.
Wang Quanzhang said he is now living in a borrowed apartment in the suburbs where the power is frequently cut off, while another lawyer left Beijing entirely in hopes of ending the harassment.
His colleague Bao Longjun said he is still in the apartment he owns, but has been barred from leaving it multiple times by unidentified groups of men who loiter outside his door.
Bao said a fourth lawyer was detained along with his wife.
All four are prominent members of a group known as the 709 lawyers, after the date — July 9, 2015 — when a crackdown on independent legal advocacy began in which hundreds were arrested.
Such advocates are a rare source of help for people facing political charges, or trying to access benefits denied by often unaccountable bureaucracies.
Their work has ranged from defending members of Falun Gong, a religious movement opposed to China’s government that Beijing bans as an “evil cult,” to helping people lobby for increases to their pensions.
All four men were disbarred after their 2015 arrests, but after being released from prison they continued to do similar work that doesn’t require a law license.
Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that the lawyers’ ordeals coincided with a series of high-profile visits by foreign dignitaries.
French President Emmanuel Macron visited Beijing in early April, followed by Germany’s foreign minister, and most recently U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
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