International media rights groups condemned China on Friday over the jailing of journalist Li Changqing for three years on charges of providing ”alarmist information” to an overseas website.
Li was sentenced on Tuesday by a court in Fuzhou in the southeastern province of Fujian for publishing an article about a local dengue fever outbreak on Boxun (www.boxun.com), a United States-based news website banned in China.
He was accused of ”spreading false and alarmist information”, said his lawyer, Mo Shaoping.
The executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Ann Cooper, called for Li to be released ”immediately and unconditionally”.
”This is a terribly unjust punishment for a journalist who has committed no crime,” Cooper said.
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders also called for the release of Li, as well as the 86 other journalists and internet users it says are detained in China.
Mo said authorities started investigating Li after he published articles to support anti-corruption Communist Party cadre Huang Jingao, who was sentenced to life in prison in November on bribery charges.
Observers said the arrest of the ”graft-busting hero” — as Huang is widely known in the Chinese media — was engineered by corrupt officials who feared being exposed.
Authorities initially wanted to prosecute Li on subversion charges over his writings on Huang but could not find enough support so they decided to prosecute him over his exposure of the dengue fever outbreak, according to Mo.
”The verdict was given according to factors outside the law,” Mo said.
Three other Chinese journalists were jailed last week for writing about villagers’ complaints over the alleged illegal government seizure of land for development.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 32 reporters imprisoned as of December last year.
Reporters Without Borders ranks China 159th on a list of 167 countries in its global press freedom index. It also labels China one of 15 nations that are ”enemies of the internet”, along with Myanmar, Iran and Syria. – AFP
