Newsdesk: Guo Feixiong sent to Shenyang

Zhang Qing, the wife of Guandong-based civil rights lawyer Guo Feixiong, who is under detention and charged with ‘illegal business activities’, was told on Jan. 19 that her husband’s case was being sent back to the police for ‘further investigations’. This is quite a rare occurrence in China, where attitudes with the judiciary tend to be based on the upholding of state power, rather than the rule of law. One imagines in these cases that the evidence against Guo must be particularly flimsy. He was also transferred to the Liaoning provincial detention center in the northeastern city of Shenyang. I hope this isn’t a ‘rendition’ within China, a way of outsourcing torture, as the Guangzhou detention center’s methods don’t seem to have elicited a confession. RFA’s Mandarin service has the full details.(ZH)