Chinese gov't targets activist who tried to help school-collapse parents

[2muchcoffeeman]

(playthrough says this deserves its own thread. OK. :) )

I'm sure the Chinese people are wonderful, but it's long past time for the Chinese government to go **** itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/asia/03quake.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

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.

From a BabelFish translation (which I apparently can't bookmark or post a link to here) of one of the articles on Huang's site, "Hu and Zeng were awarded the Reporters Without Borders - Fondation de France special “China” prize in December 2007. Time magazine named Zeng as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2007."