Human rights lawyers: 15 out of 150,000
Guo Guoting
Chinese Journalists Defense Lawyer

Guo Guoting practiced law in China for 21 years, handling more than one thousand shipping and trade cases before become involved in human rights when he took on the defense of a colleague who had been jailed for opposing Shanghai authorities over the eviction of neighborhoods marked for real estate development.

Now living in Canada, Guo defended practitioners of the Falung Gong spiritual movement, evicted home owners and jailed journalists, including Shi Tao, a reporter for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News), who was arrested after the Yahoo Internet portal identified him as the author of a message to the Democracy Forum web site in the United States. Consequently police raided Guo's law offices, seized his files and placed him under house arrest.

"No journalist wants to get involved in such cases," he said, "because the Chinese government uses its whole weight to control the media.

"Often the control measures lack any kind of legitimacy. Instead the Communist party's publicity (propaganda) department  tells newspapers, television stations and magazines, 'you should not cover this, you should not cover that.' If anyone does not obey, they will face a lot of trouble. They risk jail and could be sentenced to 10 or 12 years in prison.

"Of course, it is better now than in Mao Zedong times, because then anyone who disobeyed the authorities would lose their life.

"So many journalists and writers nowadays lose their jobs and even their freedom, simply because they post their political opinions on the Internet."

Shi Tao, an award winning journalist, was arrested for "illegally providing state secrets to foreign  entities" after he used his Yahoo account to e-mail  notes about government directives on media coverage of the 2004 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Guo said police already had Shi under observation and identified him within 24 hours of the message being sent. But it was not until six months later that he was arrested.  He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2005. Court records indicated that Shi's arrest and conviction was based in part on information provided to Chinese authorities by Yahoo.

Guo said Chinese lawyers are reluctant to get involved in media and civil rights cases because of the threats to their own livelihoods.

"in China there are about 150,000 lawyers, but only maybe 15 human rights lawyers  Of these fifteen lawyers, ninety percent have lost their jobs and some of them have been sentenced to jail. Two of them have been sent to labor camp.  Three of them were fired by their law firm. I mention this because human rights lawyer are experts of law, but they themselves have no human rights. So ordinary people in China how can they have human rights? Of course they have none.

"I carried out research to try to find out why media control in China is so serious. The main reason, I think is that Chinese government itself is losing confidence."

Guo said authorities know that if they relax control over the media, their authoritarian regime would be faced with collapse. But now they are being increasingly challenged on line, which is why the propaganda department has introduced 55 regulations to control the Internet.