On January 20th, under instructions from the 610 Office1, the New Pudong District People's Court in Shanghai City openly broke the law and refused Mr. Zeng Aihua's lawyer the right to look up his case files. Mr. Zeng is a Falun Dafa practitioner from Hong Kong and was unjustly charged. The judge in charge of his case also refused to answer phone calls from Zeng Aihua's lawyer and family members.
On November 1st, 2006, the New Pudong District Procuratorate brought an action against Mr. Zeng Aihua in the name of "using a [slanderous words omitted] to disrupt the administration of law." The case was tried by the New Pudong District Court. The judge in charge of this case is Shi Yaohui. According to Rule 36 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a lawyer has the right to look up, extract and copy the case files once the court accepts a case. However, under orders from the Shanghai 610 Office, the court did not inform Mr. Zeng's lawyer and family members when they first put forward the charges, which caused Zeng Aihua's lawyer to lose the opportunity to look up the case files initially.
On December 28th, 2006, two months after accepting Mr. Zeng Aihua's case, Judge Shi Yaohui contacted Mr. Zeng's family for the first time. However, at that time, the case had been transferred to the New Pudong Procuratorate for additional investigation, and at that point a lawyer is not able look up the relevant documents.
On January 12th, 2007, Mr. Zeng Aihua's lawyer called Judge Shi Yaohui and asked to meet with him, to look up the case files and to meet his client, Zeng Aihua. He made the call after he heard the procuratorate had finished the additional investigation and the New Pudong District Court had resumed trying Zeng Aihua's case. Shi Yaohui refused to meet Mr. Zeng's lawyer, and he said that the lawyer could not look up the case files at that time because Zeng Aihua's case was "relatively special." Furthermore, a lawyer has to wait for notification from the court about the time to look up the case files.
Zeng Aihua's family members called Shi Yaohui many times to inquire as to the situation of Mr. Zeng's case. However, the phone calls never went through. Although the personnel of the relevant departments verified Shi Yaohui was at the courthouse, Shi Yaohui still did not answer the phone calls from Zeng Aihua's family.
Before Mr. Zeng's family made phone calls, Zeng Aihua's lawyer had also called Shi Yaohui many times. However, no one answered the phone calls. The lawyer wrote to the court and called other court departments to leave his phone number and asked Shi Yaohui to call back and contact him. But he also did not get any reply from Shi Yaohui. On January 12th when the lawyer went to the reception office of the court in person and made an internal call, he was able to contact Shi Yaohui. After that, up until the time that this article was written, Shi Yaohui has never answered any other phone calls from the lawyer.
The New Pudong Court's action has directly infringed on Mr. Zeng Aihua's legal rights, which caused his lawyer to be unable to prepare his defence. The court did not allow the lawyer to look up the case files, using the excuse of it being a "special case," but they could not specify why the case was special. It is not acceptable to deprive a person of their legal rights. As a judge, Shi Yaohui intensionally refused to answer the phone calls from Mr. Zeng's lawyer and family members, which directly interfered with the lawyer's ability to handle the case. Zeng Aihua's family raised a strong protest to this behaviour. They will appeal and complain to the higher authorities. Furthermore, they will continue exposing the actions of the Shanghai 610 Office, the New Pudong District Court and other personnel involved with interfering in the legal case.
New Pudong District People's Court: 86-21-38794518. (ext. 11101 for Judge Shi Yaohui)
Judge Shi Yaohui: 86-21-68541824
The First Intermediate People's Court of Shanghai City (in charge of the New Pudong District People's Court)
Switchboard: 86-21-34254567
Case inquiry: ext. 1200; automatic inquiry: 1300
Supervision number: 86-21-62753719
Note
1. "The 610 office" is an agency specifically created to persecute Falun Gong, with absolute power over each level of administration in the Party and all other political and judiciary systems.
Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2007/1/20/147240.html
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