or-politics.com
November 27, 2015
Chinese court upheld a conviction on Thursday against a journalist accused of leaking an internal Communist Party document to a foreign website but reduced her jail sentence by two years in a case criticised by the West and rights groups.
The Third Intermediate Court of Beijing said the decision to allow Gao to serve her sentence in open custody had been based on a personal application presented on the basis of a medical certificate.
Foreign governments and human rights groups have denounced the verdict against Gao as politically driven retribution for her criticism of the government, and urged authorities to release the elderly journalist. Ms Gao was not offered the opportunity to make a statement to the court on Thursday, he said.
Gao was jailed for 15 months on the eve of the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, then detained and given a six-year jail term in 1993 for leaking state secrets in her articles.
Gao Yu is accused of “leaking” official document warning against liberal political idea.
The magazine, Mingjing News, has said Gao did not provide the document.
“Her family is likely to pick her up tonight from the police station”, Gao’s lawyer Mo Shaoping told the DPA news agency.
Mo, her lawyer, said the authorities had extracted the confession by threatening her son’s safety and released the police video to CCTV without her knowledge.
Her sentencing came amid a push under President Xi Jinping to tighten control over the press and step up curbs on the Internet and other venues for dissent. However, her defense continued to argue for her innocence, her lawyers said.
No reason was initially made public for the reduction in Gao’s sentence: Observers said the reduction of the sentence was unusual, particularly since state secret charges tend to be deployed with the specific intention to “silence critics, dissenters, journalists and party foes”, as Nicholas Bequelin, regional director for East Asia at Amnesty International, put it at the time of Gao’s jailing.
Our correspondent says many believe that Gao Yu is unpopular with the Chinese government because of her unrelenting reports focusing on China’s elite-level politics.
She had been detained since April a year ago. One Western diplomat told the Wall Street Journal (paywall) that China may have been more lenient because of a planned EU-China dialogue on human rights on Monday.
A prominent 71-year-old Chinese journalist was released from jail early on health grounds on Thursday, after being controversially imprisoned for leaking state secrets to foreigners.
