地震維權人士黃琦被指控洩露國家機密

China Rights Advocate Who Tried to Aid Quake Victims’ Parents Faces Trial
By EDWARD WONG Published: February 2, 2009,紐約時報

BEIJING — A human rights advocate who tried to help grieving parents push for an official investigation into a school that collapsed during May’s earthquake in Sichuan Province has been charged with illegal possession of state secrets, a legal step Chinese officials take when they intend to punish a dissident.
The advocate, Huang Qi, runs an informal organization called the Tianwang Human Rights Center in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, in southwest China.
Mr. Huang’s wife, Zeng Li, said she was told Monday morning of the charge against her husband and that a closed-door trial would be held on Tuesday. She later said that a judge called her at 6 p.m. to say the trial had been postponed indefinitely, possibly because several foreign news organizations had run articles about the charge on their Web sites.
People charged with “illegal possession of state secrets” have little hope of defending themselves in the court system, which operates under Communist Party control. The official definition of secrets is broad and flexible, and can be applied to widely available government documents or even reports published by state-run media. The exact secret involved is rarely revealed.
The charge is used often enough to punish people who have challenged the authorities that some human rights advocates consider allegations of illegally possessing or revealing state secrets the equivalent of a political offense under Mao.
Mr. Huang was detained on June 10 after posting an article on his center’s Web site, 64tianwang.com, relating the demands of five parents whose children had died in the collapse of Dongqi Middle School in the town of Hanwang. The parents wanted compensation, an investigation into the school’s construction and the responsible parties to be held accountable if fault was found.
Thousands of rooms in school buildings and dormitories collapsed across Sichuan and surrounding provinces during the May 12 quake. The government estimated soon after the quake that as many as 10,000 children might have been killed in the schools. In many cases, school buildings collapsed as buildings around them remained standing, raising questions about the possibility of shoddy construction.
Parents took to the streets demanding that the government investigate, presenting a sustained political challenge to local officials. Local officials ordered the police to tamp down the protests. In some cases, police officers in riot gear dragged away crying mothers who were clutching framed photos of their dead children. Later, officials offered parents money in exchange for their agreeing in writing to drop any demands for investigations.
Mr. Huang has been held without being indicted. Ms. Zeng said that plainclothes policemen had bundled him into a car. The police later told her he was being held on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.
On Monday, she said in a telephone interview that the Wuhou District People’s Court in Chengdu called her to tell her of the formal charge and an imminent trial, which she said she was told could start Tuesday. But one of his lawyers, Mo Shaoping, a prominent human rights attorney, argued that the sudden announcement of the trial date gave him too little time to prepare.
Ms. Zeng, who was not allowed to see her husband for nearly four months, said that the judge who had called her at 6 p.m. to tell her about the delay of the trial had said that the purpose of the postponement was to “safeguard Huang Qi’s legal rights.”
On Monday morning, she said the court had asked her for a telephone number to reach a lawyer. “I argued with them because I didn’t believe they didn’t have the lawyer’s contact information,” she said. Calls made to the chief judge of the court were not answered on Monday.
Illegal possession of state secrets, which carries a sentence of three years in prison, is difficult to defend against because lawyers, family members and witnesses all have limited access to the evidence in the case. If the bureaucracy that oversees state secrets certifies that information or a document in possession of the accused amounts to a secret, a conviction is generally a foregone conclusion unless higher authorities intervene to quash the case.
“There’s an expansive definition of state secrets, and the problem is it cannot be challenged, and very often the courts don’t see the documents that are allegedly state secrets,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Mr. Huang and Ms. Zeng started their human rights organization in 1998 to focus on human trafficking. In 2000, after Mr. Huang wrote on his Web site about a member of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement who had been beaten to death in policy custody, the local police blocked his site. Mr. Huang then moved his content to a server in the United States. He later wrote about a 15-year-old boy who was detained in Chengdu during the 1989 student-led protests in Beijing and died in police custody.
The police detained Mr. Huang after that, and a court eventually found him guilty of inciting subversion. He was sentenced to five years in prison. When he got out, he restarted his Web site and asked human rights advocates to contribute articles.