What the law says on paper is irrelevant if it cannot be upheld, or even stated clearly. That is why lawyers are targeted — with harassment, disbarment from the profession or even jail — by repressive regimes.
Russia’s attempts to suppress the voice of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny did not end with his death in an Arctic prison colony. In a bleak coda, three of his lawyers have been jailed for several years. Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin were found guilty of participating in an “extremist organization” for relaying his messages to the outside world.
The Center for Human Rights in Iran warned earlier this year that Iranian lawyers were being kicked out of the profession, arrested and jailed for representing protesters and dissidents.
Center executive director Hadi Ghaemi said: “Every lawyer imprisoned or disbarred represents many defendants whose rights have been trampled and now lack legal defence.”
In China, where more than 300 human rights lawyers who had dared to take on sensitive cases were detained in 2015’s “709 crackdown,” the pressure continues.
As a grim joke had it at the height of the campaign, “even lawyers’ lawyers need lawyers” — those who represented arrested friends were then seized themselves.
The unrelenting nature of the clampdown is particularly striking when, as Chinese lawyer Liang Xiaojun (梁小軍) said: “We know we can’t win.” When the verdict is clear before a case has started, lawyers can only offer solidarity, spread their clients’ stories, and highlight the gulf between legal theory and reality. However, in doing so, they challenge the official narrative. Targeting those lawyers did not just signal that resistance only invites further trouble. It attacked the concept of the rule of law itself, which lawyers had attempted to assert, hammering home the message that the party’s power was unassailable.
The Council of Europe warned earlier last month that there are increasing reports of harassment, threats and other attacks on the practice of law internationally. The human rights body has adopted the first international treaty aiming to protect the profession of lawyer. Member states should now ratify this. Lawyers must be defended, as they defend others and the concepts of rules and justice.
That message is more important than ever as the administration of US President Donald Trump turns on lawyers and judges as part of its broader assault on the institutions of democracy and the principles that underpin them. The sanctioning of staff at the International Criminal Court is only the most flagrant example.
American Bar Association president William R. Bay told members in a recent letter: “Government actions evidence a clear and disconcerting pattern. If a court issues a decision this administration does not agree with, the judge is targeted. If a lawyer represents parties in a dispute with the administration, or ... represents parties the administration does not like, lawyers are targeted.” Government lawyers, too, have faced “personal attacks, intimidation, firings and demotions for simply fulfilling their professional responsibilities,” he added.
Democratic governments and civil society must speak up for the law wherever it is threatened. Bay is right to urge those in the profession to stand up and be counted.
“If we don’t speak now, when will we speak?” he said.
The law still counts — materially and culturally — in the US. Those who practice it need some of the courage in resisting abuses that their counterparts have shown elsewhere.
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