China Leader Sued Over Tiananmen
Li Peng, the premier of China at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, has been served with a lawsuit accusing him of human rights abuses for the bloody crackdown on democracy advocates.
The lawsuit, filed under seal Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, was made public after Li's security personnel received it, said Jennie Green, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Green said Li, now chairman of China's national legislature and the second-most powerful figure in the Chinese Communist Party, could be served because he is visiting New York to attend the Conference of Presiding Officers of National Parliaments at the United Nations this week.
"You bring your crimes with you," she said.
The lawsuit, filed in New York, said it was relying for legal authority on the Alien Torts Claims Act, which permits claims of torture happening outside the United States to be heard in U.S. courts. It requires the defendant to be served with the complaint on U.S. soil.
In earlier suits brought under the act, U.S. courts have often awarded huge sums in damages, but little money has been collected. Most of the defendants have left the country and it's too expensive to trace their assets abroad. Still, even with no damages collected, plaintiffs can claim a moral victory over torture.
Li has been a target of victims of the government crackdown who point out that he went on national television to declare martial law two weeks before the military crackdown killed hundreds of people in and around Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
At the time, the Chinese government described the protests as an attempt to overthrow Communist Party rule. Demands for a government investigation into the crackdown and compensation for victims have been ignored.
A message for comment left Thursday with the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan was not returned.
During a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, Li said the world would be led astray if certain countries "attempt to impose their own social system, development model or values on others under various pretexts."
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages on behalf of those who were "summarily executed, arbitrarily detained and subjected to other gross human rights abuses." It said the Chinese government had "a deliberate policy to indiscriminately inflict deadly violence on the civilian population."
Li bears responsibility for the crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, according to four plaintiffs in the lawsuit who spoke at a news conference Thursday.
"Over the last year, we have sought redress but have gotten no response," said Liming Zhang, whose sister was shot to death by troops during the crackdown. "Eleven years have passed but so far the government has not even issued an apology."
In May 1999, relatives of people killed and injured during the protests submitted a petition to China's top prosecutor demanding n official investigation. A year later, they said they had gotten no response while the prosecutor's office said it had not received the letter.
According to China's communist People's Daily newspaper, Lee is 71. After serving as premier from 1988 to 1997, he was named head of the National People's Congress and remains a member of the Chinese Communist Party's central committee, on which President Jiang Zemin and current Premier Zhu Rongji also sit.
By LARRY NEUMEISTER