Licenses of Beijing Human Rights Lawyers Threatened

According to Human Rights Watch and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Beijing legal authorities are threatening to deny renewal of the legal licenses of some of the city’s high profile civil-rights lawyers.

“It is unprecedented to have so many prominent lawyers facing difficulties with their license renewal,” Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “This is a sort of backhand retaliation by judicial authorities in Beijing to warn the firms that employ these lawyers that there might be consequences to their business if they don’t keep their distance.”

The authorities in rural China have frequently sought to silence or intimidate activist lawyers by holding up the annual renewal of their licenses to practice law. But in Beijing, the renewal process, which involves filling out a form and paying a fee, has generally been trouble-free until now.