Heart and spirit remain free -
But denied to us.
The second part of artist and political activist Wu Yuren's trial is scheduled for this morning (details here - please come out to support, if you're free today).
Sentencing is unlikely to happen today, but we're hoping we will at least get a verdict. Even the unjust, but long almost inevitable, guilty verdict will be something of a relief by this stage. Wu has been in detention for nearly 8 months now; and the horrible stresses and uncertainties of the trial have been dragging on for over 2 months. Any sort of 'closure' here will be most welcome; another futile, open-ended adjournment would be agony. Moreover, it seems that the pre-conviction phase will probably prove to have been the worst part of the whole ordeal; conditions in prisons - though pretty spartan - are in general not nearly as bad as those in the chronically overcrowded 'temporary' detention centres, such as the one where Wu has had to spend the last 8 months. There are no facilities for work, study, or exercise in these places; there's no heating or air-conditioning; he spends the nights on a communal sleeping platform with up to two dozen other guys; and during the day he's forced to sit completely immobile for hours at a time on a hard wooden bench (it would fit with this government's perverse view of 'paternalism' to suppose that this might be a conscious if misguided policy of attempted reform, like a domineering parent shrieking, "Just sit there and think about what you've done!"; more probably, they just have nothing else for the detainees to do). Most importantly, he would be allowed some visits from his family in a prison; his wife, Karen, has only been able to see him twice - fleeting, unofficial encounters - since he was 'disappeared' at the end of last May; his six-year-old daughter, Hannah, not at all.
So, a guilty verdict (and the consequent wildly disproportionate sentence - he's charged with spraining a cop's finger, for heaven's sake!) won't be so bad now for Wu, his family, friends, and supporters - though it will be depressing in what it signifies of the wretched state of the criminal justice system in this country.
However, there is perhaps a chance - just a slim chance - that the presiding judge might now throw the case out. I doubt if any judge in such a case would dare to take that sort of decision on their own initiative (since there is some evidence, the eye-witness testimony of a number of police officers - not very much, not very convincing, not very self-consistent, not very plausible, but some); but if someone in the Ministry of Justice, or higher up in the government, wants to make a point to the police about the importance of preserving video evidence (from closed-circuit TV cameras installed in police stations: new regulations supposedly require all footage to be kept for at least 6 months, but - ooops!), then maybe, just maybe, messages may have been passed down from on high telling the judge to slap the police down on this one. Fingers crossed.
I'll try to post more news today or tomorrow.
Today is a big day for Wu and his family. Please spare them a thought.
Update: Much as I expected, this Friday's session was a bit of a non-event - all done and dusted in just 30 or 40 minutes. The judge was informed of the reasons why there was no further video evidence available (which, if true, should have been known at the time of the original hearing in November; the 10-week adjournment we've just suffered was utterly unnecessary). I had hoped there might have been at least a token dressing down of the police and the procurator's office from the bench for this - but no. Most bizarrely, and worryingly, the prosecutor concluded his statement on this by declaring that he was confident in the reliability of the evidence against Wu Yuren - which seems to be an attempt to get the judge to give some weight to the video evidence that no longer exists and has not been seen by anyone (Had the prosecutor ever seen it, hmm? Since the tapes were allegedly destroyed when the CCTV system in Jiuxianqiao police station was replaced just a month or so after Wu's detention, before a charge had been formally made, it seems highly unlikely! A statement like that would not be allowed to go unchallenged in almost any other country in the world, but here....). It seems there was no opportunity for the defence to ask for the case to be dismissed (there's probably no procedure for that in Chinese law; the criminal justice system here is essentially a bureaucratic process rather than a forensic one, with little or no provision made for the possibility of 'innocence'). And when Wu was asked for his reaction to these revelations, and replied that it showed that China was a dangerous place to live and one couldn't have any confidence in the system here, he was rebuked by the judge. You can read his wife Karen's account of the proceedings here.
And that's it. No further evidence (I'm not sure if the defence has been - or will be - allowed to call any witnesses). No verdict. No sentence. Another adjournment sine die. It seems pretty likely they'll try to spring the verdict (and the sentencing, if we're lucky; although these usually happen at separate hearings, just to drag the process out even longer), towards the end of the upcoming Chinese New Year celebrations - when they know that Karen, who orchestrates most of the publicity around the case, is going to be out of the country on a much-needed holiday with their daughter.
I'll post the date for that as soon as I hear about it.
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