9 Sept 2011

China jails activist for "stirring up trouble"

Wang Lihong, a Chinese rights activist, has been sentenced to nine months in jail for staging a protest on behalf of other activists in a move condemned by human rights campaigners as part a broad crackdown on dissent.

The 55-year-old, a veteran of China's 1989 pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, plans to appeal the sentence in the next 10 days, Liu Xiaoyuan, defence lawyer, told the AFP news agency on Friday.

Wang-Lihong-at-a-protest

If Wang loses her appeal, she is due to be released in December, taking into account her time already spent in detention, Liu said. Her lawyer said the sentence was "relatively light" compared to the five-year maximum prison term that the Beijing court could have meted out.

But her son, Qi Jianxiang, told reporters: "I think this is a heavy sentence. She should never have been sentenced at all. My mother wasn't campaigning for rights for her own interest but for the sake of others, and now she has been sentenced for it," he said.

Al Jazeera