Human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng, pictured at his home on October 18, 2022. Guillermo Abril
Chinese authorities arrested Yu Wensheng, a well-known human rights lawyer, and his wife, Xu Yan, on Thursday when they were on their way to a meeting at the European Union delegation in China, located in the diplomatic quarter of Beijing.
Both had planned to participate in a meeting between European officials and Chinese civil society, which went ahead without them.
This Friday, two other Chinese activists who did participate in the meeting, Wang Quanzhang, Wang Yu, in addition to the latter's husband, Bao Longjun, have been placed under house arrest, as several of the activists have denounced through social networks. involved and the EU delegation, which has demanded their "immediate and unconditional release".
In addition, he has filed a protest with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for what he considers an "unacceptable treatment."
Wang has also confirmed to this newspaper the participation of her and her husband in the meeting at the headquarters of the European delegation in Beijing and her home detention since this morning.
Up to "eight strong men" have prevented both from leaving their home "illegally", according to this lawyer.
“They take us to the Bajiao police station.
They forced us [some police officers] to get into the car from the subway.
They said they were going to prosecute us verbally.
It's embarrassing,” Xu Yan recounts briefly in a video posted on Twitter in which she and Yu Wensheng are seen sitting in the back of a moving car.
In other of the images posted by Xu on Thursday afternoon, several plainclothes people, presumably police officers, are seen leading them out of subway tunnels and claiming they are accused of trying to induce crime and mayhem.
At the moment there is no news on the whereabouts of the couple.
Those arrested had been invited by the EU to a meeting with a European delegation that is visiting Beijing.
The appointment had been scheduled on the margins of the official trip of the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who should have landed in China on Thursday.
Although Borrell has not been able to travel after testing positive for covid, according to diplomatic sources, the team from the European External Action Service decided to keep the appointment with the group of lawyers and human rights activists, all of them linked to a harsh raid carried out in China in 2015, in which more than 300 lawyers were detained.
The new coup comes just days after China on Monday sentenced Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, two prominent civil and political rights lawyers, to 14 and 12 years in prison, respectively.
Both were accused of subversion for promoting the New Citizens Movement, a group that calls for greater political transparency and social justice, and for participating in a meeting in Xiamen, in the south of the country, to discuss the democratic transition in China.
The EU had condemned the sentences.
Yu Wensheng is a leading human rights lawyer who is highly critical of the country's president, Xi Jinping.
In March he had just completed a year in freedom after being sentenced to four years in prison and three additional years of deprivation of political rights for "inciting subversion of state power."
Yu was detained in 2018, one day after publishing an open letter in which he called for democratic reforms to the country's constitution.
Previously, he had also been arrested in 2014 for his relationship with him in the Occupy Hong Kong democracy movement.
"I don't regret what I've done," Yu recounted last October, in front of a tea served by his wife at his home, a small impersonal apartment located on the outskirts of Beijing, almost in the mountains.
The lawyer had dark circles under his eyes and had often touched a sore arm since his arrests in 2014. He said that he spent most of his time without leaving the house, sitting or lying on the window seat of the living room, receiving direct sunlight on his body. , something that he took as part of his recovery after years locked up and with hardly any natural light.
"I'm basically recovered," he said, "except physically."
In his account, Yu claimed to have suffered extremely harsh treatment during his detention, with interrogations for up to 18 hours a day in a windowless room, sitting on a steel chair.
And regarding the mandate of Xi, who in those days was about to revalidate the position at the head of the Communist Party of China, he assured: “In these 10 years there has been a degeneration of human rights and the rule of law.
I just hope it doesn't get worse."
Before his imprisonment, Yu had tried to sue the Chinese government for serious environmental pollution and risk to public health.
He had also defended members of the Falun Gong religious group, which is banned in China, and had represented several of the human rights lawyers arrested during the aforementioned 2015 raid. One of his most prominent clients was lawyer Wang Quanzhang, also He is currently being held at his home.
Brussels and Beijing resumed dialogue on human rights in February of this year, an official channel that had been frozen since 2019. The two blows against dissent this week come shortly after the visit to Beijing by the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez , and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
Both leaders claimed to have raised the always thorny issue of human rights in their interviews with the Chinese government and welcomed the resumption of talks.
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