BEIJING: Gu Kailai, the wife of deposed Chinese leader Bo Xilai and a career lawyer, faces possible execution at the hands of a swift, unblinking justice system that she once championed.
Gu, who practiced commercial law and wrote once a book about her experiences of both the Chinese and U.S. legal systems, will be at the centre of highly politicized trial this month in which rule of law is unlikely to attract more than token attention. Legal experts and activists expect her to receive the kind of rapid guilty verdict handed down in almost all Chinese criminal trials – the kind Gu once compared favorably to U.S. legal practice where she felt the guilty risked going free on legal technicalities.
“As long as it is known that you, John Doe, killed someone, you will be arrested, tried and shot to death,” Gu wrote of Chinese criminal justice in her 1998 book. Chinese law, she explained, did “not mince words”.
Now Gu finds herself on the other side of Chinese law in a case that experts say is unlikely even to become a rallying point for China’s marginalized supporters of judicial reform.
“It simply cuts too close to core issues of internal (Communist) Party politics and the handover of power,” said Carl Minzner, a Chinese law expert at New York’s Fordham University School of Law, casting Gu’s trial as part of a political campaign against her husband, once seen as a candidate to join China’s next top leadership team to be unveiled late this year.
China has long had an official agenda of enforcing rule of law and its case against Gu has drawn global interest, not only because of the political overtones but because the victim, former Bo family friend Neil Heywood, is British and Frenchman Patrick Devillers is a potential witness. (Reuters)