DYYAD endorses the nomination of Chinese human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong for the IBA 2018 Human Rights Award

The Human Rights Defenders Support Network (DYYAD), a joint venture of the Hellenic Action for Human Rights “Pleiades” and Lawyers Without Borders

Nominating Chinese human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong for the IBA 2018 Human Rights Award.

Every year, the International Bar Association presents an award to "an outstanding lawyer in the world of human rights law". 

Mr. Jiang Tianyong, among other horrendous consequences of his human rights activity, which include torture, deprivation of freedom, defamation and intense administrative and judicial harassment, has been stripped off his licence.

Given the instrumentalization of Bar Associations in initiating and maintaining harassment against Lawyers, which is sometimes observed in an ambiance of utter impunity, reaching the point of devoted Lawyers' permanent disbarment, we believe that this is a parameter that should be simultaneously underlined and loudly decried. The outcry on that aspect of his treatment should lead to him gaining back his licence and we therefore clearly add this demand in the social dialogue escorting his nomination, along with the request that  he gains his licence back and that his colleagues, who decided the disbarment, are named and checked on whether they deserve to keep carrying the honor of being a Lawyer.

- DYYAD co-sponsors the nomination of Chinese human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong for the IBA 2018 Human Rights Award

-DYYAD decries human rights violations against Mr.Tianyong, including the instrumentalization of his Bar Association, turning the latter into an accomplice in the atrocities perpetrated against him. DYYAD requests that the mechanisms having led to his disbarment should be investigated and appropriate safeguards should be adopted to protect lawyers from harassment and arbitrary disbarment, including sanctions on those responsible.

-DYYAD asks that Mr.Tianyong's lawyers licence is re-issued and that any form of harassment against him ceases permanently.

 Yaxue Cao from China Change in Washington DC has prepared the following draft document nominating Chinese human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong from the 709 crackdown for this important award. 

Like most of the lawyers who have gotten into human rights cases and thus earned the title ‘human rights lawyer’ in China,  Jiang Tianyong grew up in poverty in a rural area, and came of age with a deep-rooted sense that Chinese society was unfair. Like many others, he didn’t get a law degree at university, but passed the bar exam via self-study. “I have always been attracted to the notion of rights, law, democracy,” he said in a 2010 interview, noting the role lawyers have played in the last few hundreds of years of social change.

With his newly-acquired law license, he quit his job as a high school Chinese teacher in Zhengzhou, the capital city of his home province Henan, and went to Beijing to be a lawyer in December 2004. In 2005, Jiang was the trial defense lawyer of Chen Guangcheng, a blind man in rural Shandong who fought against brutal practices of birth control. “It was only with the Chen Guangcheng case that I truly entered the ranks of the human rights lawyers,” Jiang said.Soon after, Jiang ramped up his human rights work, representing clients in a series of landmark cases: Gao Zhisheng, a lawyer tortured and imprisoned for speaking out against the barbaric persecution of Falun Gong that began in 1999; private oil well owners in the Shanbei oilfields who had their assets expropriated by the state; farmers in Taishi village, Guangzhou, who sought to sack local Party officials for corruption; and dissident Hu Jia who went on to receive the Sakharov Prize in 2008. In 2008 alone, Jiang represented more than 20 Falun Gong cases.
In late 2005, at the height of a HIV epidemic in China caused by contaminated blood transfusions, Jiang was one of the lawyers who collaborated with an NGO to represent poor rural victims.In 2009, Jiang represented Jigme Guri, a senior monk at Labrang monastery in southern Gansu, who was arrested after providing a video recording of unrest on March 14 to Voice of America.To be a human rights lawyer in China is a constant battle against not only a judicial system in thrall to the Party’s dictatorial agenda, but also administrative harassment including onerous annual reviews and temporary suspensions of practice.  In late 2009, Jiang was one of the eight lawyers in Beijing stripped of their law licenses. It was another punishment reserved for ‘incorrigible’ human rights lawyers in addition to imprisonment and detention.
Disbarment didn’t end Jiang Tianyong’s human rights work. On the contrary, it was a new beginning. “The problem we face now,” he told an interviewer in 2010, “is how to continue our work and do it better. If we stop, the authorities would have fulfilled their goal. Going forward, even though they do not recognize my status as a lawyer, I have the best professional knowledge, and nothing stops me from providing legal counsel and assistance to people in need. In other words, the more the authorities try to banish us from the rights defense activities, the more and the better we strive to do.”
That he has done.  He took his role beyond that of a lawyer. He became a liaison between the community of human rights lawyers and human rights activists. When a human rights case occurs, he makes arrangements to connect clients with lawyers, and often also finds and secures funding for cases.
In 2012, as a new wave of crackdowns on civil society, internet freedom, and independent NGO activities dawned after Xi Jinping took power, Jiang Tianyong and two other disbarred lawyers initiated the China Human Rights Lawyers Group, a loose network of 300 or so lawyers (around 0.1% of China’s 300,000 lawyers) to work together to protect human rights and promote the rule of law through representing cases, socializing, and issuing legal opinions and statements.
Over the decade since China’s rights defense movement began in the early 2000s, human rights lawyers have emerged as the convergence point in a struggle for a fair and just society, and are treated as a major threat to the security of the communist regime. That’s the logic behind the massive crackdown on human rights lawyers that began on July 9, 2015, and is still ongoing, with changing tactics from torture and imprisonment to disbarment.
Jiang Tianyong was not among the 709 lawyers initially rounded up. He immediately threw himself into ‘rescue’ work, at a time when the terror was palpable, meeting with wives and children of the detained lawyers and activists and recruiting lawyers for the detained. He visited embassies in Beijing many times, asking them to speak out against this human rights disaster and risk drawing the ire of the Chinese government. He met with Mr. Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, in August 2016.
Finally, he was apprehended after he visited the wife and children of lawyer Xie Yang, one of the 709 detainees in Changsha in November 2016. Not surprisingly, Chinese state propaganda organs released a video portraying him as an unemployed malingerer who works with ‘anti-China foreign forces’ to subvert China’s national security.He was coerced to go on national television several months later to ‘confess’ that he had fabricated reports of the torture of lawyer Xie Yang, revelations that put the Chinese authorities under immense international pressure.  Jiang was tried on August 22, 2017, and sentenced to two years in prison for ‘inciting subversion of state power.’
Jiang’s work has come with costs, and he is one of the many lawyers to have been brutalized in custody. During the protests in the spring of 2011, described as the ‘Jasmine Revolution,’ he was one of the hundreds across China who were rounded up and tortured. For sixty days he was subject to physical and psychological abuses that he later revealed to media. In 2012, he was bailed up by at least five Internal Security agents after visiting Chen Guangcheng, who made his daring escape from his village in Shandong to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Jiang’s left eardrum was ruptured from the beating he received. In 2014, eight of his ribs were broken when he and three other lawyers visited a black jail in Heilongjiang province.
“I’m a lawyer who was born at just the right time,” Jiang Tianyong’s Twitter biography reads, “a lawyer who’s willing to take any case; a lawyer hated by a political group; a lawyer who wants to win the respect of regular folk; a lawyer who kept going even after being stripped of his law license.”   Nominated by Yaxue Cao, director of China Change (chinachange.org), Washington, DC