The detention by the Laos authorities of Lu Siwei, a Chinese human rights lawyer who had fled China but is not targeted by any arrest warrant, places this small communist country, very dependent on Beijing, in a delicate situation. International mobilization is mounting in favor of the lawyer, while Vientiane, which claims to have arrested him because of “fraudulent travel documents” when he passed the immigration check to go to Thailand, is visibly under pressure from China to send him back. Mr. Lu is detained without being able to communicate, under legal conditions incompatible with a simple violation of immigration rules.
“Official requests from his lawyers to meet him have gone unanswered. The Lao government is apparently afraid to give a reason why its access is blocked. His lawyers consider that it is now a political and not a legal affair. And that it is directly managed at the highest level of the Lao government,” reveals Peter Dahlin, co-founder of the Spanish NGO Safeguard Defenders, which specializes in “enforced disappearances” of dissidents organized by the Chinese regime in China or abroad.
Lu Siwei is one of those Chinese lawyers in the crosshairs of the Xi Jinping regime, which accuses them “to use the law for political ends” when defending opponents of the Chinese Communist Party. In the case of Mr. Lu, it is the defense of one of the twelve Hong Kong protesters intercepted in 2020 by the Chinese coast guard while trying to reach Taiwan clandestinely on a speedboat. In retaliation, the lawyer was disbarred.
Ban on leaving the territory
In May 2021, he wants to go to the United States, which has granted him a scholarship, with his wife and daughter, but discovers when passing the Chinese immigration control that he is the subject of a measure. ban on leaving the territory – another of the tools of the political police to control dissidents. His wife and daughter fly alone to the United States.
Two years later, in July 2023, the lawyer decides to join them: he leaves China illegally and goes to Laos, where two members, of American nationality, of ChinaAid, a Christian NGO helping Chinese dissidents, are waiting for him. . With his passport with Thai and American visas, he was arrested on July 28 not far from Vientiane, at the station of the train that crosses the Mekong, the border between Laos and Thailand. He is taken away by the police despite the protests of his two companions.
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