The non-profit association Reporters Without Borders (RWB) said Yahoo had been implicated for a third time in the conviction of a Chinese Internet writer on subversion charges, citing a copy of the court verdict against Jiang Lijun (姜力均/姜力军), a former private enterprise boss in China’s Liaoning Province.
According to the group, the Chinese court alleged that in 2002 Jiang posted an article on the Web advocating the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party. “The verdict indicated that Jiang Lijun wrote that the Chinese regime was ‘autocratic’, that he favoured a ‘so-called western-style democracy’ and planned to set up a political party. It also said that he planned to disrupt the 16th Communist Party Congress by phoning the police with a false bomb alert,” said the group’s announcement.
According to the verdict, said RWB, Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) had verified that Jiang Lijun and Li Yibing, another “pro-democracy activist”, were the users of the e-mail account from which the article in question had been sent.
Associated Press and Reuters stuck to the original RWB press release in writing their own news reports on the incident. These were picked up by ABC News International, Hong Kong’s Apple Daily (Article: 雅虎又助京拘人) and others.
In the past, Yahoo has been criticized for its alleged involvement in the convictions of Li Zhi (李志) and Shi Tao (师涛). Li Zhi was sentenced after posting online comments criticizing official corruption. Shi Tao was convicted after allegedly sending internal documents overseas via e-mail.
The Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group, made copies of the court verdict in the Jiang Lijun case available on its Website in both Chinese and English.
READ: Help US Firms Free China’s Web (IHT)
[Posted by David Bandurski, April 20, 2006, 10:41am]