A Beijing court on Monday handed Australian writer Yang Hengjun a suspended death sentence, a family friend said, five years after he was first detained in China and three years after a closed-door trial on espionage charges.
Yang, a pro-democracy blogger, is an Australian citizen born in China who was working in New York before his arrest at Guangzhou airport in 2019. He had been accused of spying for a country China had not publicly identified and the details of the case against him were unknown.
Sydney based scholar Feng Chongyi said a court on Monday delivered a suspended death sentence that would convert to life imprisonment after two years.
He said the verdict was relayed to him by Yang’s family in court.
It was a “serious case of injustice”, he said, adding Yang had denied the charges. He urged the Australian government to seek medical parole for Yang.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in a statement in January the Australian government was “deeply troubled by the ongoing delays in his case”, noting he had been detained for five years without a verdict, and was advocating for his well-being “at the highest levels”.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
