After 5 months in detention, my jailed Chinese artist friend Wu Yuren has finally had a court date set for his trial.
His wife and lawyer were summoned to a pre-trial meeting to fix the arrangements yesterday morning. They received only a few hours notice of this. And they were initially sent to entirely the wrong venue for the meeting. And when they got to the right venue, miles out of town, his wife wasn't allowed in anyway - because the judge didn't feel 'comfortable' with foreigners. Ah, China.
Anyway, it seems the details of the charge against him have been refined, and somewhat ameliorated: it looked like they were going to accuse him of hitting a policeman, but now they're just saying that he "injured the officer's finger" in trying to snatch a video camera out of his hand. I'm not sure that this will make much difference to the severity of sentencing, but we can hope. At least it's nice to see that the suggestion that he had somehow "beat up" a cop in a room with five other cops was too ludicrous to fly even in a Chinese courtroom.
The trial will be two weeks from today, 9.30am on Wednesday 17th November.
There is still time to join in Amnesty USA's letter-writing campaign on Wu's behalf, but please do so quickly.
I have a feeling that such lobbying could be particularly influential in the run-up to the trial. Please - FORWARD THAT LINK
TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE.
2 comments:
I'm surprised that he wasn't charged with assaulting the officer's hand with his face.
Looks like.. ummm.. progress.... progress in China at least.
It's astonishing, appalling - but, sadly, not at all surprising - that they gave Karen and her lawyer barely 18 hours' warning of the meeting on Tuesday morning.
Mind you, I had feared that notice of the trial itself - if given at all - would be similarly last-minute. Two weeks' warning is much better than I'd expected.
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