“The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers.”
A debate has long been rumbling within legal circles about a line spoken by one of Shakespeare’s characters in the play Henry VI Part 2: “The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers.” The debate is about whether he was saying kill all the lawyers so his tyrannical paymaster could bully and plunder the people with impunity, or was he merely saying kill all the lawyers as vengeance for the irritations they cause.
The nobler interpretation of the line – even though it’s delivered during a moment of comic relief in the play – is of course the first, where lawyers stand against the will and whim of dictators, and with the weight and purpose of the law behind them defend the rights of the common people.
In China, this breed of lawyer is starting to gain prominence, appearing more and more often between the Party and those whom the Party doesn’t know how to – or simply refuses to – deal with fairly, rationally, or legally.
In some fields, these lawyers know they will invariably ‘lose’ every case they take on: seeking justice for the families of Falun Gong practitioners hospitalized or beaten to death by police and their cohorts, for example. Another field where no lawyer or defendant could hope to prevail is seeking any kind of legal recourse in relation to the Tiananmen Massacre 20 years ago – these are apparently among the Party’s ‘no-go’ areas, crucial nerves that the Party fears if touched would send it and all China into convulsions.
Until recently, Tibet would most likely have belonged on the list of no-go topics for lawyers. In April 2008, a group of 21 lawyers signed a petition calling on the authorities to ensure that Tibetans detained in protests over the previous weeks should be assured legal assistance. In response to this apparently outrageous suggestion that someone in police detention should have access to a lawyer, the Beijing Bar Association told the lawyers that their licenses would not be renewed, and that they were regarded as supporting the “Dalai clique” – potentially, a serious crime under Chinese law.
In addition to these threats, many of these lawyers have faced physical threats in the form of beatings, arbitrary detentions, and other forms of harassment. One of the most famous, Gao Zhisheng, has not been seen since February, when it was assumed certain people in the Party had simply had enough of his attempts to defend their detractors – Christians, Falun Gong practitioners and the like – and locked him up somewhere. Not even his family knows where he is, and fearing for their own lives, his wife and son fled China in March of this year. Another, Cheng Hai, who was among the 21 to sign the April 2008 petition, was badly beaten in mid-April when visiting the mother of an imprisoned Falun Gong practitioner in Chengdu.
The primary motivation of these lawyers is not necessarily a sympathy per se for Christians or Falun Gong practitioners, but rather a will to see rule of law prevail.
And now, amazingly, despite the extreme sensitivity of the ‘Tibet Question’ to the Chinese authorities, and despite the threats and the physical danger to themselves and their families, two of these lawyers – Jiang Tianyong, who signed the petition in April 2008, and Li Fangping, also a prominent human rights lawyer – have emerged to try and defend what some observers once was thought was the indefensible: Tibetan political prisoners.
Just this week, they went to Lanzhou to defend a monk, Labrang Jigme. Detained for six months without ever seeing a lawyer, Labrang Jigme was particularly vulnerable having spoken at length in a video later posted on YouTube about being seriously tortured – and almost killed – during a previous detention. It’s thought that this earlier detention was in connection with protests in and around his monastery in March 2008, but it’s not even certain that Labrang Jigme took part in the protests.
When Labrang Jigme’s captors found out that Jiang and Li were on their way, he was released before the lawyers could even meet him, and sent home under a form of house arrest.
The first case of a Tibetan political prisoner that Jiang and Li became involved with is that of a senior Tibetan lama, Phurbu Rinpoche, accused of possessing guns and of expropriating government land and property.
The area of Tibet where this particular case is unfolding has been a cauldron of seething discontent for many years, and since the protests of March last year there has been a steady stream of reports of protests. Among a catalog of grievances, the single issue that causes the most anger and despair is the requirement for monks, nuns, government workers and even school-children, to denounce the Dalai Lama, a requirement regarded as a devastating spiritual and emotional betrayal of the essence of Tibetan culture and religion.
By all accounts, Phurbu Rinpoche nurtured good relations with the local authorities and consistently advocated compromise and dialog, and with a large body of Chinese as well as Tibetan students, he was a hugely influential and conciliatory figure in the community.
Perhaps the Party decided his influence was becoming too great and that it was time to ‘take him down’. There’s certainly precedent for this with the arrest and eventual life sentence in 2003 for Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, also a senior and highly respected lama. While Phurbu Rinpoche is charged with illegal possession of weapons, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche was charged in connection with “causing explosions” amid almost identical concerns to those surrounding Phurbu Rinpoche’s case: that he was tortured into confessing, that the case against him was deeply flawed and mishandled on numerous levels, and that there were suspicions that the local authorities merely wanted him ‘out of the way’.
As the lawyers pointed out in their statement to the court on April 21, translated in full by ICT, the case against Phurbu Rinpoche is so full of gaping holes, and the police and prosecution’s handling of the case so incompetent, that the charges are completely untenable. Nevertheless, even the lawyers privately concede that there little hope of keeping Phurbu Rinpoche out of prison, if that’s where the Party wants him to be.
But this is what lawyers such as Li Fangping and Jiang Tianyong are up against when they take on cases like this. Phurbu Rinpoche may be their client, but his trial and its outcome will be the latest test-case for the Party’s increasingly hollow claims that “China is a country ruled by law.”
There are glimmers of hope for the dignity of the law in the long-run. In other fields, lawyers such as these have made discernible progress, with parents gaining access to courts to pursue accountability over tainted milk powder that killed or poisoned their children; progress may even be possible, thanks to the tenacity and determination of these lawyers, over the stench of corruption surrounding the shoddily built schools that collapsed in the May 2008 earthquake, killing thousands of children while government and Party officials rode out the quake in their palatial offices, sometimes next door to the schools that fell.
There’s no way of knowing how many innocent people – Tibetans and Chinese – are behind bars or worse because of the Party’s determination to extinguish opposition. In this context, it’s worth noting that the same Shakespeare character who says “The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers,” later says “If we mean to thrive and do good, break open the gaols and let out the prisoners.”
As we charitably assume he commented on the noble role that lawyers can play, lets also charitably assume he means release those who shouldn’t be behind bars in the first place.
(Photo Caption: Li Fangping, one of the lawyers representing Phurbu Rinpoche.)
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I think the record would show that the admonition by Jack Cade’s followers found its source in a perception shared by many commoners in the south that the Kings Bench had been used by Henry, and more precisely, his wife’s family, as an instrument of tyranny. Eliminate his surrogates and you come face to face with the King and test his ability to control his subjects. In many ways, the lawyer’s role in modern society has remained the same.