Leading legal activist Xu Zhiyong was granted bail yesterday - a rare event for human rights campaigners on the mainland.
But the fate of the legal aid group that he co-founded remained uncertain. Mr Xu was detained on July 29 and formally arrested on August 13 for failing to pay taxes for the Open Constitution Initiative, or Gongmeng. Zhou Ze , one of Mr Xu's lawyers, said the granting of bail could mean that the court was less likely to send his client to jail as long as he could pay his fines, which now stand at 1.3 million yuan (HK$1.47 million).
Greeted by friends and supporters after his release in Beijing, Mr Xu, 36, said that in the future he would be compassionate to people with different opinions, including those responsible for social injustice, and he might take a more low-profile approach to handling sensitive issues. He said he was told yesterday morning that bail had been granted. 'I didn't see this coming. Right now I am very moved by all the support from a lot of people, including those on the internet, within China and overseas,' he said.
Unlike most of the dissidents detained or sentenced on subversion charges in the central government's recent campaign to clamp down on activism and dissenting voices, Mr Xu, 36, was accused of failing to pay tax for the Open Constitution Initiative. The government closed the legal group last month.
Despite the seemingly non- political cause behind the case, many supporters said Mr Xu's arrest and the closure of the group, which had taken on many sensitive cases, was a gesture to restrain a booming civil rights advocacy movement on the mainland in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic.
Teng Biao, another co-founder of Gongmeng, said the group was scraping together enough money for the fines, and donations were flooding in. But Mr Teng said Mr Xu could still face prosecution if the government decided to press ahead with the charges.
