China embeds Communist Party loyalty in the national law governing lawyers
The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted an amendment to the Lawyers Law on August 28, effective September 1. The revised statute makes support for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party an explicit legal qualification for admission to practice, alongside upholding the Constitution and the socialist rule-of-law system, and adds a provision requiring that lawyers’ work adhere to Party leadership and implement Party and state policy. Law firms are obliged to establish internal Party organisations and to supply the space, personnel, and funding for their activities. These requirements previously existed only in Ministry of Justice regulations issued in 2018 and 2019; moving them into national legislation is the clearest case this week of a state formally conscripting the legal profession, and follows a decade of pressure on rights lawyers dating to the 2015 crackdown in which more than 300 lawyers and legal workers were detained or lost their licences.