The long and obscure arm of the law

The long and obscure arm of the law

BEIJING

CHINA's criminal justice machine moves relentlessly and predictably. It thus come as no surprise to people who had followed the case that that Xue Feng (pictured above), an American geologist, was convicted on July 5th and sentenced to an eight-year prison term on charges of illegally obtaining state secrets related to the oil industry.

Criminal defendants in China enjoy little in the way of guaranteed access to legal counsel, rights to call their own witnesses, or the opportunity to challenge evidence and testimony against them. Seldom do Chinese criminal-court proceedings end with anything other than a guilty verdict. For the nine years ending in 2006, the national rate of conviction in first-instance criminal cases stood at over 99%.

Its predictable result notwithstanding, Mr Xue’s case was far from typical. For one thing, the American ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, was in attendance at Beijing’s Number One Intermediate People’s Court when the sentence was announced. For another, the wheels of justice turned more slowly than usual this time. The verdict came down more than 31 months after Mr Xue’s initial detention in November 2007, after numerous false starts and postponements, in apparent violation of China’s own laws governing the time allowed for prosecutors to conclude a case.

Mr Xue’s family alleges that he was repeatedly beaten and tortured while in official custody—they say that police stubbed out cigarettes on his bare arms. Sadly the scenes they describe are all too common in cases like his.

Mr Huntsman’s presence at the sentencing was a clear indication of the American government’s interest in the case, but it was not the first. During an official visit to Beijing last November, Barack Obama quietly raised Mr Xue’s case with Chinese leaders. Months earlier, American officials had been denied permission to send consular officials to observe court proceedings against him, again in violation of China’s own laws.

According to the Associated Press, which first broke the news of this case, American officials were in doubt as to the wisdom of advocating more publicly on behalf of Mr Xue. Upon finally gaining consular access to American officials, Mr Xue told them he favoured a public campaign for his release. But officials were persuaded against this by Mr Xue’s wife, who still lives in the United States. She argued that such a campaign might both harm his chances for release and endanger members of her family who live in China.

Born in China, Mr Xue was educated and later took citizenship in America. He ran afoul of Chinese law after arranging the purchase of a database on China’s commercial oil industry on behalf of his American employer, an energy-consulting firm.

What counts as a state secret in China is notoriously murky and arbitrarily enforced. In another recent case an Australian citizen of Chinese origin was charged with violating state secrets for passing along commercial information related to the iron-ore market. Stern Hu had been employed by Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian mining giant.

Despite frequent and vocal representations made by Australia’s government on Mr Hu’s behalf, he was convicted on charges of bribery and violating trade secrecy, and sentenced in March to a prison terms of ten years. According to some of the Australians who have followed Mr Hu’s case most closely, there are indications that he did indeed violate Chinese law. Though Australia's government failed to keep Mr Hu out of jail, its efforts to publicise his case may have benefited him in some measure. It seems that he at least has not been tortured.