NEW BIO:Teng Biao is an academic lawyer, currently the Hauser Human Rights Scholar at Hunter College and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. Previously, he was a lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law in Beijing and a visiting scholar at Yale, Harvard, New York University, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Teng’s research focuses on criminal justice, human rights, social movements, and political transition in China. He defended cases involving freedom of expression, religious freedom, the death penalty, Tibetans, and Uyghurs. He co-founded two human rights NGOs in Beijing, the Open Constitution Initiative, and China Against the Death Penalty, in 2003 and 2010, respectively. He is one of the earliest promoters of the Rights Defense Movement in China and the manifesto Charter 08, for which Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Teng has received various international human rights awards including the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic (2007) and National Endowment for Democracy’s Democracy Award (2008). He is completing two books on the human rights movement in China and on transnational repression.
I’m afraid that those of you who excitedly applauded the Communist Party’s rehashing of the term “governing the country according to the law” have forgotten the famous words of Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Jiang Yu, who once warned sternly, “Don’t use the law as a shield.”