Jolene Chen
On February 5, 2021, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate released the First Batch of Model Cases on the Protection of Lawyers’ Right to Practice (the “Cases”), which contain supervision cases involving a lawyer’s right to know, a lawyer’s right to meet his or her client, an assistant lawyer’s assistance with the client meeting, and a lawyer’s right to express opinions. They are intended to provide a better supervisory and demonstration role in safeguarding lawyers’ right to practice.
In the second supervision case therein, an Attorney Wang applied for the right to meet a defendant client, but the investigation authority refused to allow the lawyer to meet the suspect during the arrest stage of a suspected bribery case on the ground that the meeting required permission from the department handling the case. In regard to such matter, after receiving the lawyer’s complaint and reviewing the reason for the refusal, the procuratorate found that the investigation authority did not possess an accurate understanding of the newly amended law during the arrest stage and failed to update its knowledge that particularly large bribery criminal cases no longer fall within the scope of meeting restriction cases. Therefore, the procuratorate promptly supervised and corrected the situation.
In the fourth supervision case, an Attorney Zhu applied for assisting with a client meeting as an assistant lawyer, but the staff of the detention center indicated that entry into the detention center to assist a client meeting required identity verification by the case handling agency, but the investigation agency denied the request on the ground that it had not handled the relevant formalities, and it did not specifically know how to verify the identity of an assistant lawyer. The lawyer and the assistant lawyer then applied to the Rights Defense Center of the Bar Association for protection of rights and assistance. After the matter was verified by a certain district procuratorate, the investigation agency personnel were interviewed, and it was found that the original case handling agency had inappropriately refused the assistant lawyer identity verification, to which the procuratorate orally provided its correction opinion to the investigation agency. It is believed that through the release of this case, de facto restriction or obstruction to the exercise of litigation rights by an assistant lawyer can be avoided to a certain extent, thereby providing active guiding significance in protecting a lawyer’s right to practice pursuant to law.