Veritas Presents: Terence Halliday on Human Rights Law in China

The Equal Justice Project is proud to lend its support to Veritas (Christians at Law School), another University of Auckland-based organisation affiliated with our faculty. They are holding an event on the 3rd of March and have extended an invitation to all members of the public to attend. This event will be a talk by Research Professor Terence Halliday on the subject of Human Rights law in China. We are promoting this event to our supporters, volunteers, and community members and encourage your participation should this be an issue that you are interested in.Please RSVP to the event on Facebook here should you wish to attend. For more information, an abstract has been provided by Veritas below:On 9 July 2015, China's Party-State began an unprecedented crackdown on hundreds of leading human rights and defense lawyers. Lawyers have been detained, interrogated, disappeared, with several now charged with serious crimes of subverting state power. This sharp repressive turn by China's leaders has brought into the world's headlines the heroic activities of growing numbers of Chinese lawyer-activists who fight for basic legal freedoms, a moderate state, and a vibrant civil society. The presentation places the crackdown in the context of a decade-long empirical study of China's criminal defense lawyers, their ideals, their challenges, the foundations of their courage, and their attempts to sustain a momentum for legal change under the scrutiny an increasingly authoritarian state. The presentation further contextualizes struggles for basic legal freedoms in China with extensive cross-disciplinary scholarship on cases of lawyer activism in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas over the past two centuries. Terence Halliday, Research Professor and Co-Director of the Center on Law and Globalization, ABF, will be drawing on his forthcoming book "Criminal Defence in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work" by Sida Liu and Terence Halliday (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2016) to present an engaging and challenging perspective on the fights for legal freedoms by lawyers and judges in China as similarly presented at several leading law schools (Harvard Law School, University of Chicago and Northwestern University).