顺便再贴一次更新版的英文信模板。
Dear Mr./Ms./（头衔） [Name],
My name is XXX. I am writing to urge you to voice for two young Chinese COVID-19 activists, who were detained by Beijing police on April 19, 2020, held incommunicado for 54 days, and now face trial on criminal charges after sharing censored coronavirus materials on crowdsourcing site Github. If convicted they could face up to seven years in prison.
Their stories have been covered by multiple media outlets worldwide such as South China Morning Post (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3089002/coronavirus-chinese-activists-held-posting-censored-articles), New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/world/asia/china-coronavirus-answers.html), Daily Mail (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8261025/Three-Beijing-activists-missing-preserving-virus-articles-online.html), and Sky News Australia (https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6160626747001). Organizations such as Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/2289/2020/en/), Reporters without Borders (https://rsf.org/en/news/covid-19-six-chinese-defenders-press-freedom-still-detention) and Front Line Defenders (https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/right-information-defenders-detained-undisclosed-location-0) have also called for their release.
Cai and Chen were contributors to a crowd-sourced Github project known as Terminus2049, which aims at overcoming China's censorship by preserving censored news content. Since the COVID-19 outbreak in China, they have collected and archived around 100 articles related to the pandemic, with topics ranging from leaked documents to deleted news. On April 19, 2020, Cai and Chen were arrested on charges of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble”, an accusation often used against political activists in China. For 54 days they had been kept under “residential surveillance in a designated location (RSDL)”, a term that refers to China’s “secret prisons.” Detainees under RSDL are deprived of their legal rights such as access to attorneys, and face high risks of tortures and ill-treatment.
After two months' secret detention, Cai and Chen were formally arrested on 6/12. Beijing police told their families that the two volunteers had "voluntarily applied for free legal aid" and had each been appointed two lawyers, despite the fact that their family had long hired their own lawyers. In China, defendants under arrest for criminal charges can only be visited by their legal representatives (maximum two), and thus the volunteers were effectively denied any communication with their families or access to trusted legal aid. The government-appointed lawyers were often used in cases against political activists to ensure that the police and prosecutors have full control of the case.
Cai graduated from one of China's top university, Tsinghua University, with a master's degree in sociology; and Chen graduated from South China Agricultural University. They had volunteered in multiple non-profit organizations focused on education and public welfare. Since 2018, Cai and Chen had been fighting in the frontline for the freedom of speech and press in China. Some of their earliest work was related to the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, but they have also covered issues such as the eviction of poor migrant workers in Beijing. Their crowd-sourced social projects help to wake and encourage Chinese both in mainland and oversea to join the campaigns against the censorship and propaganda orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Since the pandemic, there have been more than 3700 COVID-19 related arrests made in China. With the increasing toll from COVID-19 we have seen first hand the costs of censorship from the CCP in the lives of innocent people all over the world. U.S. Assistant Secretary Robert Destro voiced for Chen and Cai on twitter (https://twitter.com/DRL_AS/status/1255239304986624002) and called it "shameful" to arrest and detain people who try to share information about COVID-19. "What is the CCP so afraid they might uncover?" He asked, "We need transparency to fight this pandemic together." United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet also expressed her concerns about the suppression of freedom of expression in China during the COVID-19 outbreak, including the detaining of Cai Wei and Chen Mei (https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25920&LangID=E). This isn’t a matter of politics, this is a matter of basic human rights.
Please help voice for the Cai and Chen, defenders of freedom of press and speech in this time of pandemic, when the transparency of information can make the difference between life and death. Please ask Beijing to reveal their latest conditions, let them see their family's hired lawyers, and help them to avoid further restriction of freedom and torture.
Thank you very much!
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
