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Chinese activist seeks medical parole:
Xinhua
AP AND AFP, BEIJING
A Chinese father-turned-activist imprisoned for protesting a tainted milk
scandal is seeking medical parole, state media said yesterday in what might be a
deal with authorities hoping to tamp public anger over his harsh sentence.
Zhao Lianhai (趙連海), whose son was among children sickened in one of China’s
worst food safety scandals, was sentenced earlier this month to two-and-a-half
years in prison for inciting social disorder. Zhao campaigned for compensation
for families of those killed or sickened because of the adulteration of milk and
milk products with the industrial chemical melamine.
He first vowed to fight his conviction, said he would go on a hunger strike and
last week signed legal forms for the appeal. However, he has since been under
apparent pressure not to appeal.
Xinhua news agency said in a report early yesterday that Zhao’s application for
medical parole had been accepted by judicial authorities. Zhao’s lawyers said
they were unable to confirm the report.
A woman who answered the telephone at the Daxing district People’s Court in
Beijing, where Zhao was convicted, said she was unclear about Zhao’s case and
unable to check whether he had applied for medical parole.
One of Zhao’s lawyers, Li Fangping (李方平), said he never discussed the
possibility of medical parole with Zhao and was not aware of any health problems
he might have.
In a sign that Zhao’s stance was changing, the prison told his lawyers last week
that Zhao did not want to see them. On Monday, Zhao again refused to see his
lawyers and dismissed them via a handwritten note, said Peng Jian (彭劍), his
other attorney.
“It certainly creates a suspicion that some sort of a deal or other sort of
inducement has led to his decision not to appeal,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, the
Hong Kong-based senior research manager for the Duihua Foundation, which
advocates on behalf of political and religious prisoners in China. “It’s quite
possible that they are looking for ways to defuse the situation without
admitting that they were wrong to sentence him in the first place.”
Beyond the pressure on Zhao, Peng said on Monday that he was detained over the
weekend for about 48 hours at a guest house north of Beijing by four
plainclothes police who asked him to respect the court’s initial verdict.
Zhao’s conviction comes amid stepped-up efforts by Chinese authorities to
silence dissent. Environmentalists, AIDS activists and lawyers who took on
sensitive cases have disappeared, been locked up, or otherwise harassed, while
this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, dissident writer Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), is
serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion handed down after he
co-authored a call for widespread reform of the authoritarian, one-party
political system.
Meanwhile, state media said on Monday that authorities in Hubei Province were
searching for 50 packages of a corn-flavored dairy drink found to have been
laced with melamine.
The government had said after the 2008 scandal that it destroyed all tainted
milk powder, but reports of melamine-laced products have regularly re-emerged.
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