'No one is safe': 10 years after crackdown, China's human rights lawyers speak out

A decade on from China's biggest crackdown on human rights lawyers in modern history, lawyers and activists say the Chinese Communist party's control over the legal profession has tightened, making rights defence work next to impossible.

- Amy Hawkins

The environment for human rights law had "steadily regressed, especially after the pandemic", said Ren Quanniu, a disbarred human rights lawyer. "Right now, the rule of law in China - especially in terms of protecting human rights - has deteriorated to a point where it's almost comparable to the Cultural Revolution era."

The Cultural Revolution was a decade of mass chaos unleashed by China's former leader Mao Zedong in 1966. During that time judicial organs were attacked as "bourgeois" and the court system was largely suspended.

Ren is one of hundreds of human rights lawyers to have been targeted since the "709 incident", a nationwide crackdown on lawyers and activists that started on 9 July 2015.

According to human rights groups and the US government, about 300 people from the loose collective of a burgeoning rights defence movement, known as weiquan, were targeted in the roundup.

At least 10 were convicted of crimes such as "subversion of state power" and given jail terms, while dozens more have been subjected to surveillance, harassment and the revocation of their professional licences.