Journalists beaten back from courtroom by Chinese police

Chinese police shoved diplomats, journalists and protestors away from a Beijing courthouse where the trial of prominent human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang began on Monday.

He posted comments on social media sites alleged to have mocked the governing Communist Party and questioning policies and treatment of the Uighur minority.

Almost a dozen diplomats from countries including the US, Germany and France, gathered at Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court seeking to observe the trial, but were refused admittance by police, some uniformed and some plainclothes state security officials wearing smiley badges. Pu could be sentenced to eight years in prison if he is convicted for the seven posts on Weibo.

If he had not spent the last 19 months in detention, blocked from communicating with his wife and the world, he might relish the ridiculousness of the word “quarrel”, posting online about the irony of it all: a free speech advocate detained for speaking, a lawyer at risk of being abandoned by the law.

Pu, 50, was detained in May 2014 after he attended a meeting in a private home to commemorate the suppression of pro-democracy protests in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

“Pu’s trial is extremely important – he’s the ultimate canary in the coalmine”, said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch. But Pu insisted he had no intention of sparking ethnic hatred or creating a disturbance, Mo said, and pleaded innocent. On WeChat, a popular messaging service similar to Facebook, some users shared posts in support of the lawyer, while others switched their profile pictures to an image of Pu.

The scene outside the court on Monday was decidedly unruly, with diplomats, journalists and Chinese petitioners pushed and cursed at by police.

Police had tried to prevent Biers from reading the statement near the courthouse, Reuters reports.

Eva Pils, China law expert at King’s College, London, said Pu’s trial was “part of a crackdown on civil society…”

Pu’s closed trial concluded by midday with no verdict announced, his family told reporters.

A spokesperson for the United States Embassy in Beijing reportedly expressed “great concern” over the incident, while the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China condemned “the harassment of and violence against” reporters covering the trial.

An outspoken lawyer, Pu has defended a string of sensitive figures in China including celebrity artist Ai Wei Wei. They said it would not be decided by “pressure from the West”. In those posts, he criticized government officials as well as policy in China’s ethnic borderlands.

An editorial in the Global Times newspaper, a Communist Party organ, warned Monday that any attempt by Western nations to “interfere” in Pu’s case would be seen as an “attack on China’s rule of law”. Beijing prosecutors indicted Pu this May on the two current charges, but dropped charges of “inciting separatism” and “illegally obtaining personal information”. In July, authorities rounded up about 200 human rights lawyers in a major nationwide sweep; many of them remain behind bars.