On April 28, the New York charity organization “Friends of Chinese Lawyers” released the “2024 Annual Report on the Rights and Interests of Chinese Lawyers”, pointing out that over the past year, the practicing rights of Chinese lawyers have continued to be severely eroded, especially in criminal cases where the phenomenon of official lawyers appointed by the Chinese Communist Party has become normalized, further constricting the space for lawyers to operate.
The “2024 Annual Report on the Rights and Interests of Chinese Lawyers” systematically outlined the common situations of rights infringement faced by lawyers in civil, commercial, administrative, and criminal cases in 2024. It also included typical cases of infringements on lawyers’ rights and public actions to safeguard lawyers’ rights initiated by civil society.
The report highlighted that criminal cases are a major area where the rights and interests of lawyers are violated. The most prominent phenomenon is the abuse of the system of “officially appointed lawyers”, which has spread to various types of cases, including not only politically sensitive cases but also cases involving organized crime, corruption, and those dominated by the disciplinary and supervisory systems.
According to the report, the so-called “seat-filling defense” refers to the practice where authorities swiftly assign lawyers to defendants through legal aid centers, locking in defense spots in the legal process and preventing privately hired lawyers from intervening. This deprives many defendants of their right to choose their defense lawyer. Cases such as the Wu Min case and Zhang Zhan case demonstrate that the “seat-filling” behavior is not only widespread but is also becoming “institutionalized”, with increasing diverse methods to prevent retained lawyers from intervention, including administrative harassment, communication blockage, access restrictions, and even initiating investigations or penalties against the lawyers themselves.
To counter the phenomenon of “officially appointed lawyers taking seats”, a radical and unconventional “tomb-raiding defense” strategy has emerged among the lawyer community. In situations where normal defense paths are blocked, some lawyers have resorted to exposing the misconduct, academic fraud, and corrupt practices of judicial officials through non-litigious means, effectively forcing them to retreat or expose judicial injustices.
In response to this, prominent rights lawyer Li Fangping expressed to Radio Free Asia on the 29th, “Although this strategy breaks through the traditional legal defense model and carries a confrontational stance outside the courtroom, in the current judicial environment, it has become a non-mainstream defense mode to expose the abuse of power, judicial manipulation, and tear down the veil of judicial shame. Its emergence precisely reflects the deterioration of the rule of law environment and the continued shrinking space for lawyers’ survival.”
Apart from the phenomenon of official lawyers “taking seats”, the report also highlighted other violations of lawyers’ rights in the field of criminal defense. This includes difficulty in meetings, reviewing documents, high risks in investigating and collecting evidence, conflicts between defense and prosecution, as well as conflicts during the trial process, making it difficult for lawyers to perform their duties normally and often subjected to disciplinary actions or retaliation by judicial authorities.
The report calls on the Chinese authorities to clean up the abuse of charges in the “Criminal Law”, safeguard lawyers’ rights to meetings, document review, investigation and evidence collection, abolish the unwritten rules of “officially appointed lawyers taking seats”, reform the system where lawyers associations are “officially managed and politically controlled”, and establish an independent arbitration platform. At the same time, it suggests making defense work by lawyers more open and collaborative, in order to increase influence and effectively protect themselves.
The writing team of the report includes two rights lawyers who are still under pressure, three former Chinese lawyers serving international organizations, and two researchers from public interest legal organizations.