About This Book China has not only entered an “Age of Rights” – as some Chinese scholars have called it – but also an Age of Rights Defence Lawyers. By using peaceful, lawful and constitutional channels to fight against injustice, China’s “rights defence lawyers” have become the heroes of our time and living exemplars of the Chinese people’s quest for the Rule of Law and human rights. This book is both a testimony to their noble endeavours and a study of the challenges and difficulties they face. The authors include leading scholars in the field and some of the activist lawyers themselves, as well as Taiwan lawyers who share with us their valuable experience across the Strait. It is my pleasure to recommend this book to all those interested in and concerned about law and justice in contemporary China. — Professor Albert H.Y. Chen, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong This book is a comprehensive presentation of the Rights Defence movement, the new avatar of the pro-democracy struggle in China. The pleas by Chinese lawyers show how they try to use all aspects of an incomplete law to defend the rights of citizens against the violations committed by the post-totalitarian regime, while articles by eminent China law specialists describe the repression that strikes the lawyers, analyse the history of the movement, and place it in the context of the struggle against authoritarianism in Greater China. This combination of first-hand material and in-depth analysis makes the book a must for anybody who is interested in the evolution of the PRC regime. — Jean-Philippe Béja, Senior Researcher of French Centre for Research on Contemporary China The authors are to be congratulated for the production of this much-needed book at a critical juncture when the world seeks to cope with the much-touted rise of China. This series of essays provides an excellent overview of the human rights problems facing human rights defenders in China’s not-so-harmonious society. It will surely prove important to the emerging community of human rights lawyers in China and serve to connect them to the wider human rights legal community. The rich combination of contributions from both local practitioners and scholars provides excellent insight into the difficult human rights problems in China’s era of reform. Outsiders will be moved to ask whether China’s rise poses opportunity or threat as China seeks to take up its position on the world stage. Does the Chinese system promise respect for thehuman rights of peasants and workers, of Tibetans and Uyghurs? To the extent it does not, is China prepared for its global role? This book will surely help analysts and policy makers consider these issues. At the same time it may offer insight as to where efforts at supporting China’s reforms may best be directed. — Michael Davis, Professor, Department of Government and Public Administration, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Dr. Johnson reckoned that courage was the greatest of all virtues because, without it, a man had no security with which to preserve any other virtue. Some of the articles in this book recount the stories of courageous lawyers who, at great personal cost to themselves, have striven to preserve the great virtues of justice and the rule of law in the teeth of hostile government interests that threatened the lawyers with imprisonment and worse. Lawyers reading this book will ask themselves the stern, but necessary, question of whether they would, or could, display the same courage if they were in a similar situation. In trying to answer it, they will be forced to question, perhaps for the first time, what it really means to be a lawyer. — Philip Dykes SC
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