Chinese authorities are continuing to hold five women's rights activists who had planned activities in three cities on International Women's Day, and have denied them access to lawyers, activists said on Monday.
Li Tingting, Wei Tingting, Wang Man, Zheng Churan and Wu Rongrong, the founder and executive director of the Hangzhou-based rights group Women Center, have remained behind bars after police detained at least 10 people across the country on March 6, activist Feng Yuan told Agence France-Presse.
According to Women Center board member Lu Jun, at least two of the women look likely to be held on criminal charges, and none has yet been allowed a visit from their lawyers.
"They had been planning to carry out some normal, legal activities publicizing sexual harassment on International Women's Day [on Sunday]," Lu told RFA soon after the activists were detained.
"But the police intervened just as their activities were about to start, and shut them down in a rough and rude manner."
"What they were doing was legal, and in the public interest," Lu told RFA in a later interview on Monday. "The government should have been encouraging these activities, rather than suppressing them in such a brutal manner."
Lu had earlier said some younger women were summoned by police but later released, but that Wu and Zheng had been told that they would be criminally detained.
"Their families have already hired lawyers," Lu said in an interview on Friday, adding that the lawyers had begun negotiating with police for visiting rights, but to no avail.
Feng said none of the women, who had planned to observe International Women's Day by putting up leaflets about sexual harassment in Beijing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou, had been permitted to see a lawyer by Monday.
NPC’s annual session
The detentions came amid the annual session of China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC), in Beijing, where delegates held a news conference on gender equality and women's rights on Saturday.
"We're worried that they're still detained," Feng told AFP said from New York, where she was participating in U.N. women's issues events. "We don't understand how this has to do with public safety."
"And this goes against what the Communist Party and the government says they want to do to build a safer, crime-free society," she said.
Banners calling for the release of the women were visible during a march held in New York Sunday for International Women's Day, she added.
Li Tingting's lawyer Yan Xin told RFA on Monday that she is being held at the Haidian District Detention Center in Beijing.
"I have been to the detention center in Haidian, and I have filed the relevant applications," Yan said.
"They verified that she was there, I saw the name," he said. "They said I would have to wait for them to nofify me after submitting my application for a meeting with [Li]."
He said detention center staff had declined to give him any details of criminal charges against Li, however.
"When I asked them, they said I'd have to wait to be formally notified by the department handling the case," Yan said.
Detention is illegal
Rights lawyer Tang Jitian said the women's detention was illegal.
"These activists from Hangzhou, Beijing and Guangzhou have been working for women's rights for a long time, and their job is to help other people stand up for their rights," Tang said.
"They don't do any harm to society, and the coercive measures the...police have taken against them are illegal," he said.
China's ruling Communist Party has promoted gender equality, at least in theory, since it came to power in 1949.
But women's and rights campaigners say the reality is very different on the ground, and that discrimination still presents major obstacles to equality.
The Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing set out a challenging program of improvements to the rights and opportunities offered to women and girls around the world, as well as requiring governments to report back to the U.N. on progress in key areas.
The Beijing Declaration produced by the conference included a pledge to "ensure equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all women and girls."
But the authorities last November slapped a travel ban on a women's rights activist, identified only by her surname Zheng, who tried to attend a U.N. working group on the conference in Thailand.
Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wen Yuqing for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.