Chinese human rights activist forced from her home

Blogger Zeng Jinyan fears tighter restrictions on movements as dissident husband’s prison sentence comes to an end Hacked, harassed and now evicted, the wife of one of China’s best-known human rights activists fears she may be put under house arrest when her husband is freed from prison later this month. Zeng Jinyan has been told by police that the end of her husband Hu Jia ‘s three-and-a-half year jail term on 26 June could mean the start of tighter restrictions on her movements. Rather than have her three-year-old daughter live with them under house arrest, she is now planning to put her child into the care of family and close friends. Zeng, a blogger and activist, recently moved from Beijing to the southern city of Shenzhen in the hope of escaping the political pressures on her family that started long before her husband was convicted of “inciting subversion of state power”. But her hopes for a peaceful homecoming have been disrupted by public security officers, who have forced her landlady to evict her, put pressure on employers and raised the prospect of a resumption of the controls and monitoring she had to endure four years ago . Her Gmail account has been hacked several times. “Police officers told me it is true that we may have to live like we did before Hu Jia’s detention. He was under house arrest for almost four years before that,” Zeng wrote. “I must try to arrange something for my daughter so she is not under house arrest with me.” Release from prison does not mean freedom for many Chinese political prisoners due to the increasingly frequent use of so-called “soft detention” or “residential surveillance”. In the last year, the blind activist Chen Guangcheng, lawyer Zheng Enchong and Mongolian dissident writer, Hada, have been held incommunicado after their release. Huang Qi, an activist who campaigned against the shoddily built schools that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake, was released on Friday after a three-year sentence, but police banned his wife, Zeng Li, from picking him up from prison. She told the South China Morning Post: “I worry that they won’t bring him back but will hold him somewhere else – that has happened to some of our friends.” Many civil rights lawyers have also gone missing this year or been temporarily detained and tortured in arguably the harshest crackdown since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Foreign governments and human rights groups have raised alarms about extra-legal intimidation and detentions by state security, the police and hired thugs. But Beijing seems unwilling to listen. On Wednesday, the European parliament president, Jerzy Buzek, a former Solidarity activist in Poland, called on the Chinese authorities to investigate reports that Zeng and her daughter were threatened with an “unjust” eviction. Two days later, Zeng tweeted that her landlady had evicted her. State security passed on a message to Zeng: “We don’t want you to stay here.” She will leave Shenzhen next week. Before then, she has invited her friends and supporters to a farewell tea party, paid for with the money she received from her landlady for breaking their contract. Hu Jia China Human rights Blogging Censorship Jonathan Watts guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 10, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.