This book offers a unique insight into the role of human rights lawyers in Chinese law and politics. In her extensive account, Eva Pils shows how these practitioners are important as legal advocates for victims of injustice and how bureaucratic systems of control operate to subdue and marginalise them. The book also discusses how human rights lawyers and the social forces they work for and with challenge the system. In conditions where organised political opposition is prohibited, rights lawyers have begun to articulate and coordinate demands for legal and political change.
Drawing on hundreds of anonymised conversations, the book analyses in detail human rights lawyers’ legal advocacy in the face of severe institutional limitations and their experiences of repression at the hands of the police and state security apparatus, along with the intellectual, political and moral resources lawyers draw upon to survive and resist. Key concerns include the interaction between the lawyers and their bureaucratic, professional and social environments and the forms and long term political impact of resistance. In addressing these issues, Pils offers a rare evaluative perspective on China’s legal and political system, and proposes new ways to assess domestic advocacy’s relationship with international human rights and rule of law promotion.
This book will be of great interest and use to students and scholars of law, Chinese studies, socio-legal studies, political studies, international relations, and sociology. It is also of direct value to people working in the fields of human rights advocacy, law, politics, international relations, and journalism.
Biography
Eva Pils is Reader in Transnational Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. She studied law, philosophy and sinology in Heidelberg, London and Beijing, qualified as a lawyer in Germany and holds a PhD in law from University College London. Her scholarship focuses on human rights and the law in China, with publications addressing the role and situation of Chinese human rights lawyers, land and eviction rights, criminal justice, access to justice and conceptions of justice in China. Her publications on these topics have appeared in academic publications as well as in the popular press. She has held appointments at New York University Law School, Cornell University Law School, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, and is a non-resident senior research fellow at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School.
"Pils provides extraordinary insight into how the government controls lawyers through a mix of bureaucratic procedures and extralegal coercion and how the legal system works against citizens when their claims challenge official prerogatives." - Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs
'Pils’s commitment to giving voice to Chinese human rights lawyers, and her sustained interactions with many of them, makes her book a valuable sketch of this milieu’s aspirations and anxieties.' - Rachel E. Stern, Law & Social Inquiry, Journal of the American Bar Foundation
