Prominent Chinese Lawyer Detained by Police Since Early May Zhang Jianzhong, the head of a Beijing-based committee to protect lawyers' rights, has been in custody since May 3 and has not been allowed to meet with his attorney, said the expert, Jerome Cohen of New York University. Chinese law says that suspects have a right to meet with an attorney within 48 hours of being detained, but police routinely deny authorization. Cohen, on a recent visit to Beijing, said Zhang was believed to have been detained because he offended senior Communist Party officials during his work defending other top officials accused of corruption. Zhang was the leading partner at Concord Law Firm, the sixth-largest of about 9,000 firms in China. An official at the firm confirmed that Zhang disappeared in early May but declined to comment further. Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, has reported that families of Chinese suspects can spend months or even years searching for their loved ones after arrests, despite the laws guaranteeing access to a lawyer and family notification. One example is Yang Jianli, an exiled Chinese dissident who was arrested on April 26 after sneaking back into China and meeting with striking workers in the country's northeast. Yang is a permanent resident of the United States. His whereabouts are still unknown, according to his brother, Yang Jianjun, who has spent the last three days in Beijing searching for him. "I am getting doors slammed in my face all over Beijing," he said. "I don't care what my brother might have done. He still has the right to have a lawyer. The police are supposed to inform the family within 24 hours. It's been more than a month." A burly, avuncular lawyer who enjoyed the limelight, Zhang had defended several prominent suspects in major corruption cases. Among them were Cheng Kejie, the former deputy chairman of China's legislature, who was executed in 2000 for stealing millions of dollars with his mistress, and Li Jizhou, the deputy minister of public security, who got a suspended death sentence for his role in a multibillion-dollar smuggling ring the following year. Zhang also won more than $100,000 for a Chinese motorist who sued the Toyota Motor Corp. for damages after suffering serious head injuries when the driver's air bag failed to deploy on impact in a high-speed crash. On a business trip to Canada in 1999, Zhang told reporters that China's legal system was rapidly improving and said the rights of foreign investors were protected under Chinese law. Chinese authorities have not released information about Zhang's case, but Chinese sources said they believed the case concerned a controversial section of China's criminal code that can hold lawyers responsible for false testimony. The case in question involves a banker in Beijing accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars from his bank. Zhang was not his attorney, but had worked on the case. Chinese sources said the case had angered Premier Zhu Rongji because of the size of the alleged theft, more than $50 million. Cohen expressed concern that Chinese authorities may be using this as an excuse to hold Zhang and that the real reason involves his work defending prominent criminal suspects. "No one knows exactly why he is in custody," Cohen said. "The police have yet to talk to anyone. They are violating Chinese law." The vaguely written section on testimony has been used by Chinese police and other security personnel to jail at least 100 other defense lawyers nationwide, Chinese sources said. The law allows police to jail lawyers if their clients' testimony in the courtroom differs from their statements made to police. This occurs often in China because police torture suspects to force them to confess. On the day of the trial, suspects often recant, placing their attorneys at risk of arrest. He Weifeng, a law professor at Beijing University, said attempts have been made to repeal the controversial section. "Laws like this make it impossible for China to have real defense attorneys," he said. "The risks are too high. If your client changes his mind and takes back his confession, you could end up in jail. What kind of law is that?"
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