MCLC: Women's activists to be charged

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MCLC LIST
Women’s activists to be charged
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (4/9/15)
Chinese Police Seeking Charges Against Detained Women’s Activists, Lawyer Says
By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Police officers in Beijing have asked prosecutors to charge five women’s rights activists who have been detained for more than a month with organizing a crowd to disturb public order, lawyers for two of them said on Thursday.
The filing allows the police to detain the activists, all of them women whose plight has led to harsh criticism from abroad, for seven more days while prosecutors make a decision on whether to bring charges.
The police had originally investigated the women on suspicion of “picking quarrels” but have since changed the charges they want prosecutors to impose, said one of the lawyers, Wang Qiushi.
He said the charges of organizing crowds to disturb public order were tied to two actions: an attempt by the women to organize a nationwide campaign last month against sexual harassment on public transportation, as well as an earlier public campaign they had carried out against domestic violence in which they wore wedding dresses smeared with fake blood.
Mr. Liang and Mr. Wang said the new charge was no different in severity than the “picking quarrels” charge on which the police had initially focused their investigation. Both charges can result in a sentence of up to five years in prison. Mr. Wang said the choice of specific charge by the police usually depends on what evidence the police can gather against a suspect.
On Wednesday, Mr. Wang, Mr. Liang and one other lawyer checked separately with the prosecutor’s office to see whether the police had made a filing in the case. Under Chinese law, the police generally must file a request for charges to be brought within 30 days of detaining a suspect. The deadline for that was on Tuesday, and the lawyers said the police had failed to make the filing on time and so were detaining the women illegally.
But on Thursday, Mr. Wang said, an official at the Haidian district prosecutor’s office in Beijing told him that the police had filed the request on April 6 and that the filing might not have been immediately entered into the computer system.
Mr. Wang said that the women had not violated any laws and that they hoped the case would be dropped.
The five women — Li Tingting, 25; Wu Rongrong, 30; Zheng Churan, 25; Wei Tingting, 26; and Wang Man, 33 — were detained in a coordinated move by police officers in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou starting the evening of March 6. That was just two days before International Women’s Day.
The campaign against sexual harassment on public transportation was supposed to have taken place over that weekend, with activists placing stickers on buses in cities across China. Because of the detentions, it never took place.
Mia Li contributed research.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 9, 2015
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