Hope: A Message to China’s Defense Lawyers
Presented by Terence Halliday
American Bar Foundation And Australian National University
Friends in China, I welcome this occasion to bring a message from your friends across the entire world East and West, South and North.
Dictators and authoritarian leaders are so very proud of their military might, so confident in the control exercised by their internal security apparatus over their own people. Think of:
Hitler and the Nazi regime that he boasted would last 1000 years
The militaristic Japan of the 1930s and 40s.
The 20th C repressive regimes in South Korea and Taiwan, the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and Brazil
All with powerful militaries, all reliant on the weapons of fear, torture, disappearance and death.
All of them, now gone.
At the height of their powers, like the ancient and modern empires, they all seemed impregnable.
But they were hollow inside. They had no soul. Their grip on the hearts of their peoples were as weak as sand in the flood of a mighty river.
And so they were swept away.
That mighty river is the flood of freedom, a freedom whose leading waves, time and time again, are lawyers. Certainly not all lawyers. Certainly not all of the time. But certainly there is a vanguard of lawyers who raise the flag of freedom with law as their weapon of choice.
China in the 21st C is a prime example of heroic lawyers.
I have known many of you, China’s defense lawyers, for many years. We’ve sat together in cafes and restaurants, in law firms and coffee shops, in hotel lobbies and parks across China’s cities and towns, counties and villages.
I KNOW YOUR IDEALS. AND SO DOES THE WORLD.
What are these ideals?
You, China’s defense lawyers, take your stand with the highest ideals of the international order.
In 2015, the year of the 709 Crackdown, the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) asserted that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has “given people everywhere a powerful tool in the fight against oppression, impunity and affronts to human dignity.”
Many of you, China’s defense and rights lawyers, also gain inspiration from a 3000 year-old set of beliefs core to the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As a Christian defense lawyer confidently asserted to me:
“Where do human rights come from? We know that God created man according to his image. I understand that our dignity and rights come from God’s image.”
Human rights, in this transcendent vision, will never be extinguished by a political party or a brutal ruler or a cruel regime built on fear.
How have you, 709 lawyers and China’s defense lawyers, expressed your vision of a NEW New China that builds itself upon universal values of freedom, equality and dignity?
You have told me that you strive for a constitutional legal order.
You reject today’s legal and social order because it relies ultimately on arbitrary arrests, torture, disappearances, forced labor, unfair court proceedings.
You press for tomorrow’s China where the constitution conforms to universal ideals of rights and justice, to the protection of basic legal freedoms and core civil rights.
You, China’s rights lawyers, fight for core political rights.
You reject today’s China where a bold doctor is silenced for speaking out about the Covid epidemic, where churches and mosques and temples are bulldozed into rubble, where any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party/CCP leads to disappearance or prison.
You hope for a tomorrow when all China’s peoples can speak freely, to express diverse political views and worship freely.
China’s defense lawyers fight for an open civil society.
You reject today’s China where the Party holds a tight group on voluntary associations.
You press for tomorrow’s China where any of China’s citizens and residents can freely form voluntary associations to share their interests and causes, where lawyers can elect their own leaders and direct their own affairs
You want tomorrow’s China where citizens can march in the streets to protect women, to protest police brutality, to demand justice for disappeared loved ones
You, China’s defense lawyers, yearn for a moderate state.
You reject today’s China where all power is concentrated in a single political party, the Chinese Communist Party/CCP.
You press for tomorrow’s China where courts and judges can hold accountable the executive power of the Party-state, where the legislative branch of government is accountable to a constitution, where rule by might is limited by rule of law, where judges are fair and neutral.
We know your ideals, your struggles, come at great cost.
We know your suffering.
You have told me of:
The never-ending uncertainty of when you will be seized when walking down the street, taking the train, sleeping in the dead of night
The “terror” of living with your family under threat – of a government that doesn’t hesitate to kidnap children or threaten the elderly parents of rights lawyers
The pain of physical torture, psychological torture, humiliations in custody, forced public confessions
The knowledge that you may die in a black prison, be thrown into a hole and never heard of again, be denied medical treatment so you die an arbitrary and cruel death
Yet, be certain of this.
Know that your voices are alive in the free world.
Know that your words are written down and published by great university presses and widely read academic journals
Know that your names remain very present in the great advocacy organizations of international civil society
Know that your voices ring out in absentia in the European Parliament and the US Congress and in the halls of the UN Human Rights Council and in many other national capitals
Know that the religious organizations of billions of believers keep your ideals fresh and enduring
Know that your sister and brother lawyers in free bar associations are standing in solidarity with you, never ceasing to support your ideals for basic legal freedoms, rule of law, and am authentic constitutionalism.
Know that the international free media broadcast the sufferings of your people to vast audiences
Know that your friends are near—across the Taiwan Strait, in South Korea, in Japan, in India
Know you have far-flung friends—across the oceans in the Americas, Europe, in the free countries of Asia and Africa.
I also have a message for Chinese Communist Party rulers and your accomplices in the regime of fear, brutality and repression.
You keep lists of those you imagine are threats to your rule.
Know this.
The world also keeps lists.
The world watches you.
You will be held accountable.
Monitors in the outside world track intensively your acts, they know your names, they record your harms
Monitors inside China, too, have memories and memories that one day will be released from confinement.
A day of reckoning is coming for China’s oppressors – just as it came for those in Germany and Chile and Argentina and Japan and the Congo and Rwanda and France.
Finally, many of China’s defense lawyer friends overseas have also known repression, the dark shadows of authoritarian fear, the terror of dark and unknown prisons.
Yet, hope remained. And now they are free.
They know that the human impulse for freedom and dignity, for self-determination and freedoms of belief and worship, for the preservation of languages and culture, cannot be crushed indefinitely.
Hollow regimes fall.
Lawyers and their ideals for basic legal freedoms, civil society, a moderate state, rule of law, and constitutionalism have inexorably persisted for centuries and those ideals have been realized wherever the sun rises and sets.
These are dark hours in the People’s Republic of China.
But tomorrow is coming!
