The ABA (Inadvertently) Frees Chinese Human Rights Lawyer from Detention
I planned for today’s post to be exclusively about the documentary Hooligan Sparrow, which I was privileged to see last evening as part of 
This week the American Bar Association holds it annual meeting in San Francisco. In July, the ABA announced that it would honor Wang Yu with its first International Human Rights Award. The ABA announced that because Wang Yu was held in detention, another Chinese human rights activist, Liu Wei , would accept the award on her behalf.
Remarkably, today the Chinese government announced Wang Yu’s release on bail, which was conditioned upon her renouncement of her profession and on the condition that she not accept any awards for her advocacy efforts from foreign entities. In her recorded statement, Ms. Yu said that she is Chinese and only accepts the Chinese government’s leadership. The statement is assumed by human rights activists to be given under pressure.
We will wait to see how long Wang Yu remains free. While on bail, she is not permitted to see friends and family, including her teenage son. Her husband was arrested in the same sweep of legal advocates.
Hooligan Sparrow is a documentary filmed ,sometimes surreptitiously, by a Chinese and American filmmaker. The film follows Ye Haiyan, known by film’s title, as she leads protests against the rape of young girls by their school principal and another education official. The demonstrations were successful, but the demonstrators paid a price. The demonstrators, including Sparrow, were detained by police for varying lengths of time, but even when living in society, they were constantly harassed by those police paid to harass the protestors.
The film is powerful and Ms. Yu is featured as the legal narrator of the film.
Nanfu Wang, the NY based filmmaker, deserves her own award for courage. The film documents Ms. Wang’s own harassment by the authorities, directly and indirectly, as she documents Sparrow’s advocacy. Ms. Wang was brave and creative in recording even in the face of police harassment.
The film will deepen your understanding of why persistent human rights advocacy is critical in the U.S. We observe advocates making small inroads in a culture that has consistently suppressed human rights. In the US, we have statutory civil rights with case law that is slowly evolving to include human rights. What we are reminded by this film is that whenever their is a void in human rights advocacy the government will fill it- and not always in compliance with human rights principles.