I have started writing a new book, and it's not set in China. In the interests of research I'm reading the memoirs of Michael Mansfield, Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer ,and of Geoffrey Robertson The Justice Game. Both books are fantastic reads. These are men who know how to tell a story – although if I had to be picky, I'd say that Michael Mansfield verges sometimes on the ramble (his book reads as though it was dictated) and Geoffrey Robertson's is more focused and structured. Michael Mansfield has picked away at bad law on forensic evidence for decades. Geoffrey Robertson has delighted in cases involving nudity and sex (depictions of Rupert Bear with an erection, a depiction of homosexual rape on stage) , but his defence of scandal always has a larger purpose. His book has made me laugh out loud. He also writes of his work for Amnesty International, observing trials in some of the least fair societies in the world.
Both books are joyous depictions of a western legal system that has many flaws – there are flawed precedents, flawed lawyers, flawed judges and flawed juries. And yet, with its constantly evolving system in which every law can be held up and examined and re-examined and held in the balance against common sense and common values, it is a work of art. On appeal, at the highest level, Britain's judges are making judgements not of the letter of the law, but of philosophical interpretation and to some extent of imagination. It is a system that relies on the men and women who practice the law to make good decisions, and to that extent it is a fragile system. As an outsider who comes back to Britain for part of each year, I am often surprised by how much my fellow countrymen and women seem to take their institutions for granted. Even democracy itself – self regulated, messy and argumentative – is surely more fragile than we assume.
But this week brings the first news in a year of Gao Zhisheng, a bold Chinese lawyer who should stand shoulder to shoulder with Michael Mansfield and Geoffrey Robertson. He has written publicly of the Chinese state's use of torture. He has said that he himself has been tortured, he has exposed and defended the most vulnerable against injustice. He vanished in February last year, and was feared dead. Now his family and the foreign press have had brief conversations with him. He says – but he has to say what he's told to say – that he is in internal exile in a Buddhist monastery in Wutaishan, forbidden to speak to the media and unable to see his family. It is men and women such as Gao Zhisheng who should be helping to shape a fairer and more independent legal system in China, but they are silenced. The very processes of debate and argument, even within the confines of a court, cannot be tolerated here. The state is afraid of fragility. But here we have a nice Taoist-sounding deeper truth – What appears on the surface to be fragile is in fact that which will endure.