China jails prominent legal activists Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi

A Chinese court sentenced two prominent human rights lawyers on Monday (10 April) to jail terms of more than a decade each, a relative and rights groups told Reuters, the latest move in a years-long crackdown on civil society by President Xi Jinping.

Xu Zhiyong, 50, and Ding Jiaxi, 55, were put on trial behind closed doors in June last year on charges of state subversion at a court in Linshu county in the northeastern province of Shandong, relatives told Reuters at the time.

Xu and Ding are prominent figures in the New Citizens Movement, which sought greater transparency into the wealth of officials and for Chinese citizens to be able to exercise their civil rights as written in the constitution.

Ding's wife Luo Shengchun, who lives in the United States and has pursued his case with US State Department officials, told Reuters about the sentencing but said she had no further details.

"Their lawyers are forbidden from publishing court verdict documents and they do not dare to reveal where they were sentenced and under what charges," she said by telephone.

She will keep pressing for information, she added.

"I will not let them put Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong in jail so easily."

Xu received a jail term of 14 years and Ding was sentenced to 12 years, she added.

The court and China's justice ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The two had been held for more than three years, with Ding taken by police in December 2019 shortly after attending a gathering in southern China with about 20 other lawyers and activists.

Then he was held incommunicado for almost six months while being routinely tortured to extract a confession, his lawyer Peng Jian told the court.

Xu, a close friend of Ding's who once wrote a searing open letter calling on Xi to step down, was detained in February 2020 after going into hiding.

Authorities have barred their lawyers from contact with foreign media, Luo added, in a practice that has become increasingly common in recent years so as to stifle publicity around rights-related cases.

Both had previously been imprisoned for their activism.

"The cruelly farcical convictions and sentences meted out to Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi show President Xi's unstinting hostility towards peaceful activism," said Yaqiu Wang, a senior China researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Their secret hearings were "riddled with procedural problems and allegations of mistreatment", the rights group added.

China has dramatically clamped down on dissent since Xi came to power in 2012. Hundreds of rights lawyers were detained and dozens jailed in a series of arrests commonly known as "709" cases, referring to a crackdown on 9 July, 2015.

China rejects criticism of its human rights record, saying it is a country with rule of law and that jailed rights lawyers and activists are criminals who have broken the law.