China: Courts upholds seven-year sentence for journalist / IFJ
www.ifj.org
Beijing’s High Court has dismissed an appeal to overturn a seven-year sentence for journalist Dong Yuyu, who has been jailed since 2022 on charges of espionage. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the ongoing incarceration of Dong Yuyu.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45888879

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The journalist’s appeal went before Beijing High Court on November 13, with the court determining to uphold the original conviction handed down in November 2024. The journalist’s son, Dong Yifu, said the court had provided no reasoning for rejecting the appeal.

Dong was arrested in February 2022, while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat at a hotel restaurant in Beijing after the XXIV Winter Olympics, which was held in the country that year. According to the court judgement, the diplomat was labelled an ‘agent of an espionage organisation’ and had also been detained for several hours before being released.

Dong remained in pre-trial detention for almost one year, before being charged with espionage in April 2023. He then remained incarcerated until the official hearing in November 2024.

[…]

Before his detainment, Dong worked with the Chinese state-run government newspaper Guangming Daily as a senior columnist for 35 years. He primarily published opinion articles and academic journals about legal reforms on social issues, state corruption and constitutional reform. He was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in 2006 and worked closely with two scholar Japanese universities that he often visited. In 2017, following a state investigation, Dong’s work was allegedly flagged by the Chinese Communist Party as being ‘anti-communist’.

[…]

China is the world’s worst jailer of journalists in the world. In 2024, the IFJ found the state had imprisoned approximately typ135 journalists and media workers for their reporting.

  • Panini@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    I don’t doubt any of that. I also don’t care, because it’s irrelevant to whether or not it’s acceptable that he’s being imprisoned for what he wrote.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlEnglish
      51·
      3 days ago

      Possibly. They arrested him for espionage. His background looks incredibly compromised, but he could just have been a smalltime grifter. This is a pretty clear cut case of someone working for a foreign government though. And the user who posted seems to spend all their time posting every single anti-China article they can find.