Freedom Now represents prisoners of conscience on a pro bono basis
LONDON (TrustLaw) - When Maran Turner began representing jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in September, he was unknown to most of his countrymen. That all changed on Oct. 8 when Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. This week Turner will be in Oslo to attend the awards ceremony.
Turner, the executive director of Freedom Now, a U.S. organisation that represents prisoners of conscience on a pro bono basis, is part of a team of lawyers acting for Liu and his wife Liu Xia, who has been placed under house arrest.
Although Liu cannot accept the award in person, Turner believes the Nobel Prize has made the world aware of his plight and that of other Chinese dissidents and may ultimately help to secure his release.
“It’s bringing attention back to the situation in China and bringing the world’s attention to him and his case,” she told TrustLaw. “I think it will have a positive impact in bringing about an early release for him.”
The awards ceremony also concludes a remarkable year for Freedom Now, in which five of its clients have been released. They include the Burmese pro-democracy leader and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a second Burmese democracy activist, a Vietnamese priest and two bloggers from Azerbaijan.
“It has been a great year, there’s no question about that,” Turner said. “We’re very excited. I hope it’s an indication of our work paying off.”
Freedom Now was founded in 2001 by six young lawyers who saw the need for an organisation that could represent prisoners of conscience throughout their detention, providing legal advice, as well as political and public relations advocacy, said Jeremy Zucker, chairman and one of the co-founders.
Freedom Now’s approach involves filing legal petitions on behalf of its clients in various international forums, such as the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. If the Working Group accepts the lawyers’ case that a country is detaining a prisoner in violation of international law, it will call upon the government to release the person.
“That rarely is enough to get somebody out of jail but it helps because we can take that decision to political leaders,” said Zucker.
Freedom Now, which is based in Washington, tries to persuade members of the U.S. Congress and parliamentary representatives in other countries to put pressure on governments detaining its clients.
It also seeks the support of the White House, State Department, British Foreign Office and the Catholic Church where appropriate. Its public relations campaigns involve hosting vigils and publishing opinion pieces in newspapers around the world.
Yang Jianli, a Chinese democracy activist and former client of Freedom Now, told TrustLaw that without the organisation’s efforts on his behalf, he would “still be languishing in a Chinese prison.”
Yang, who fled China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and was blacklisted by the government, returned to the country on a false passport in 2002 to observe labour unrest. He was arrested and held incommunicado for nearly 15 months before being sentenced to five years in prison for espionage and illegal entry.
Yang said intense lobbying on Capitol Hill by Freedom Now’s president and co-founder Jared Genser led to unanimous resolutions in both Houses of Congress calling for his release.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush also raised his case twice with the Chinese president Hu Jintao. Although he served his full sentence, Yang believes things would have been worse if not for the international pressure.
“The prison conditions were very harsh when I first got there,” he said. “They employed both physical and psychological torture techniques against me. With the pressure from outside, my prison conditions greatly improved and were much better than many others’.
“Also, the sentence came pretty much as a surprise to everybody. For the crimes I was accused of, the five-year sentence was a light one.”
Yang is now part of the legal team representing Liu Xiaobo, a friend and fellow veteran of the Tiananmen Square protest, and he is also Liu Xia’s representative to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. He and Genser will be joining Turner in Oslo.
Freedom Now represents prisoners of conscience from 11 countries. They include human rights lawyers and activists from China, Laos and Syria, journalists from Gambia and Kazakhstan, doctors from Cuba and Peru and a singer from Cameroon.
“We represent folks in almost all parts of the world,” said Zucker, who is a partner at Hogan Lovells. “We are in no way focused on a particular region, neither are we focused on a particular type of prisoner or type of issue. We are open to any and all prisoners of conscience.”
The only prisoners Freedom Now does not represent are those who have used or who have advocated the use of violence.
“That keeps us out of certain areas of the world that are in the midst of violent conflict,” said Zucker.
Freedom Now finds out about potential clients through its own research and through local NGOs around the world who bring cases to its attention. As it is a small organisation, it refers a number of cases out to law firms and there are now up to 50 pro bono lawyers from around 10 firms collaborating on them.
Zucker said the most difficult aspect of Freedom Now’s work is dealing with governments that are often resistant to outside pressure.
“It's a challenge to represent clients who have been imprisoned by governments that are well aware that what they’re doing is unjustifiable and yet are prepared to keep on doing it,” he said.
“It leads to representations that end up lasting many years in some instances...On the flip side, one of the great satisfactions lies in the hope that by virtue of our work we make it more likely that our clients will be released.”
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