Chinese Lawyers and Legal Scholars Speak Out!

This is good news!  I’m glad that more media outlest are reporting this because their have been many other scholars and lawyers that did speak out, but the communist party keeps arresting them under some law that makes it easy to arrest anyone for anything they please.  Almost like the police using “disturbing the peace” in the US when the person didn’t do anything wrong, and the cop screwed up, so to protect himself they come up with “disturbing the peace.”  It’s easy to place the blame when you have that to use, but those can be argued as well.

We need more scholars and legal experts to come out!

Report Says Valid Grievances at Root of Tibet Unrest

A group of prominent Chinese lawyers and legal scholars have released a research report arguing that the Tibetan riots and protests of March 2008 were rooted in legitimate grievances brought about by failed government policies — and not through a plot of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

The lengthy paper is the result of interviews conducted over a month in two Tibetan regions. It represents the first independent investigation into the causes of the widespread protests, which the Chinese government harshly suppressed. It blamed the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala for the unrest.

The government has quashed the expression of any dissenting opinions on the causes of the protests, which spread quickly across western China. The research paper was quietly posted last month on Chinese Web sites, and an English translation was released this week by the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in Washington.

The authors of the report are members of a Chinese group called Gongmeng, or Open Constitution Initiative, which seeks to promote legal reform in China. Lawyers in the group also tried to file lawsuits on behalf of families whose babies suffered in the tainted milk scandal last year, and two members have defended Tibetans in court this year. [read more of the valid grievances of Tibet]