Forced Away: Reporters Barred From China Trial

The trial concluded about midday, and Pu’s lawyer Shang Baojun said a verdict and sentence would be delivered at a later date.

Supporters of rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and foreign journalists stand after being pushed away by police near the Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing, Monday, Dec. 14, 2015.

“Today I came to show my support and to see if the law really exists in China, if China has human rights”, Ye Lina, a supporter of Pu’s, told The WorldPost.

Pu went on trial Monday on charges…

International media and human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have condemned the trial as politically motivated.

Mr Pu faces up to eight years in jail if he is found guilty.

One foreign journalist reported being slammed to the ground.

Pu Zhiqiang, who has previously represented Chinese activists including Ai Weiwei, is accused of inciting ethnic hatred and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all charge the government has aggressively used in recent years to stymie political dissent.

“He said he was prepared to admit to causing harm to others, and offered to make a formal apology… but he refused to plead guilty”, he said.

The statement the European Union diplomat attempted to read was that the blocking of observers from the trial raised “serious questions of consistency with China’s constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly, opinion and expression”.

In four of the seven posts, Pu had called for reform in Beijing’s policies toward Xinjiang and Tibet and the religious and ethnic in the regions – resulting in charges of “inciting ethnic hatred” for posts that allegedly “provoked ethnic relations… and damaged ethnic unity”.

“Pu’s trial is extremely important – he’s the ultimate canary in the coal mine”, Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch said.

“Pu speaks for grassroots people in China”.

Mr. Pu’s supporters say the accusations, based on seven sharp-tongued posts on Chinese social media criticizing the government, are simply an excuse to shut him up.

Chinese protesters and foreign rights groups said Pu’s trial at the No. 2 Beijing Intermediate Court amounted to political persecution, and foreign governments including the US called for his release.

“[Pu] should not be subject to continuing repression but should be allowed to contribute to the building of a…”, Biers said before being drowned out and bundled away by bellowing Chinese police officers.

“A simple theory he taught me is that, just like you have the father first and then the son, you have to have legitimate legal procedures – file the case first, gather evidence, prosecute – you cannot prosecute and then find evidence”, said a former client who only gave his surname, Xu, because he feared being arrested for speaking out.

Pu took up the law after joining the pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in 1989, which were violently broken up by the army.

Pu had freely admitted that he sent the tweets from several accounts he had set up on the popular service Sina Weibo between 2012 and May 2014, Mo said.