The police in China are keeping up their harassment of prominent rights lawyers, putting pressure on recently-evicted Wang Quanzhang and his family, slapping a travel ban on Li Heping and his family, while denying rights attorney Xie Yang a phone call with his ailing father, a media report said.
A police officer from the Beijing suburb of Changping pushed his way into the Wang family home on Wednesday, refusing to show ID and demanding to read the couple’s lease agreement, according to a video clip posted by Wang’s wife Li Wenzu on Twitter, RFA reported.
The renewed harassment is the latest in a slew of “stability maintenance” actions by Beijing police and other Chinese officials, who have targeted the families of prominent rights attorneys and other activists, who were previously jailed in a 2015 crackdown on rights lawyers and public interest law firms, the report said.
Meanwhile, the family of Li Heping is now banned from leaving China, after their landlord smashed a window at their rented apartment in a bid to get them to leave last month, RFA reported.
The police at Chengdu’s international airport prevented the family from boarding a flight to Thailand last week, as Li and his wife Wang Qiaoling are considered to be “danger to national security”.
And a court in the central city of Changsha recently denied detained rights lawyer Xie Yang a video meeting with his ailing 90-year-old father, who is terminally ill with Covid-19, RFA reported.
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