Li Wenzu, wife of detained Chinese rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, is followed by reporters and friends as she walks away from a Supreme People's Court complaints office in Beijing, China April 4, 2018.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Lawyer Wang Quanzhang, who took on sensitive cases of
complaints of police torture and defended practitioners of the
banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, went missing in August
2015 during a sweeping crackdown on rights activists.
His wife, Li Wenzu, has since heard little about her husband's fate although authorities told her lawyer he had been detained. Neither Li nor the lawyer has been allowed to see him.
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"We are walking to seek an answer from the Chinese legal
system. Is China really a country with rule of law?" Li told
reporters outside a Supreme People's Court complaints office.
"Over the last 999 days, we have tried every possible legal
means to find out what has happened to him, but there has been
no result," she said. China's public security bureau and justice department did not reply to faxed requests for comment.
On July 9, 2015, authorities launched what rights groups say
was a coordinated attempt to quash China's rights movement, in
what is known as the "709" crackdown, after the date.
At the time, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist
Party, the People's Daily, described some of the prominent
detainees as "a major criminal gang that has seriously damaged
social order".
Nearly three years on, most of those detained have been
sentenced and are in prison or under house arrest. Many of them
made public confessions and were sentenced in what their
families say were either secret or scripted trials.
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Wang's case is unusual in that no word of his fate has been
released. Li has been an energetic activist on her husband's behalf.
With support from other families effected by the crackdown, she
regularly visits the courts to file missing person reports.
She said she expected it would take her 12 days to walks to
Tianjin, over the 1,000-day anniversary of her husband's
disappearance. She is being accompanied by Wang Qiaoling, wife of another prominent rights lawyer, Li Heping.
He was handed a three-year suspended sentence for subversion last April. Li said the authorities kept her under surveillance and she
had kept her plan for her walk secret. "I didn't send anything publicly, otherwise they would have known and stopped me," Li said.
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