CHINA: A leading Chinese rights activist, known as the "blind barefoot lawyer" for his efforts to expose a campaign of forced abortions and sterilisations by family planning officials in his home town, goes on trial today after months of being detained without charge.
Chen Guangcheng (35) has been held under house arrest since August after highlighting the plight of women in Linyi, an area with some 10 million residents, and revealing how family planning officials there enforced the "one-child policy".
In a report, he and his supporters said tens of thousands of people who had an illegal number of children and were ineligible to have more were coerced into having late-term abortions or forced to have sterilisations.
Mr Chen went blind as a child and is a self-taught lawyer who was not allowed to graduate in Shandong province because of his disability. He listened in to classes and, like many so-called "barefoot lawyers", he uses what legal skills he has to represent his fellow villagers.
The reports from Linyi were horrific: of men arrested while their wives were forced to abort eight months into their pregnancies. The central government launched an investigation and a small number of officials were punished.
However, Mr Chen seems to have fallen foul of local authorities and has been under arrest almost the entire time since his report was published.
He is being tried by Yinan county court on what look like trumped-up charges - "deliberately destroying public property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic".
Mr Chen's profile in China is very high. Both domestic and foreign civil rights campaigners have called on Beijing to free him and to investigate claims that he was tortured in custody.
His lawyers claim they have been prevented from gathering evidence or talking to witnesses and have received death threats, been beaten up, locked up and intimidated by thugs as they tried to enter Mr Chen's home village of Dongshigu, where Chen's wife is also being detained.
Imposed in 1979, the one-child policy is really a rag-bag of measures. People from ethnic minorities are exempt, while farmers who have a girl first are allowed to have a second offspring. City dwellers where both partners come from one-child families can have a second child, and some people simply pay the fines. The government says no one is physically forced not to have children and reckons the policy has prevented over 400 million births.
However, in Linyi the rules were applied particularly vociferously by officials who needed to keep within quotas so as not to risk incurring black marks on their performance records.
In August, Mr Chen was put under house arrest. Then in March, after trying to report the beating of a member of his family, he disappeared for three months, before turning up in police custody. On June 21st, he was finally formally charged.
The publication of his report last year on population control in the area and legal aid for local villagers brought him huge publicity. Calling him "A blind man with legal vision", Time magazine in May named him on its list of "2006's Top 100 People Who Shape Our World".
The Chinese government has been accused of double standards. On the one hand it says it is committed to protecting human rights and establishing the rule of law, while on the other hand it is stepping up crackdowns on civil rights activists and journalists.