Legal News

Chinese Court Rejects Parents? Suit Over Kids Lost in Quake

By Dan Slater

A father holds a photo of his daughter who was killed in an earthquake, in the ruins of the Fuxin No.2 Primary School in Wufu, in China

The earthquake that in May ravaged China’s Sichuan province and left, by some estimates, nearly 90,000 people dead or missing, put China’s legal system to the test. As we noted over the summer, Chinese lawyers began using TV and the Web to teach quake survivors how to invoke their rights, from suing the government for certifying building codes for classrooms that crumbled, to suing for discrimination and poor labor conditions.

To some extent, the effort worked. Many of the Families of the 120 children who died in the collapse of the Fuxin No. 2 primary school in Wufu, for instance, attempted to sue. The parents’ complaint, presented on Dec. 1, alleged that a substandard building and inadequate rescue efforts led to unnecessary deaths. It demanded a public apology and 7.68 million yuan, or about $1.1 million, in compensation, according to Xu Peiguo, a lawyer who helped prepare the suit. The parents sued the school, the town government, the county education bureau and the boss of the construction team that built the school.

But last week a judge of the Intermediate People’s Court in nearby Deyang said that the court wouldn’t hear their case. Sang Jun, one of the parents, said the judge told parents’ representatives that government internal documents made it clear that the court should not be involved. Here’s the WSJ story.

Sang, reached on his cellphone, told the WSJ that he’s moving around in an effort to avoid the police, fearing that he will be detained. Sang said that families who lost children have each received an average of about 60,000 yuan, or about $8,800, in payments from government agencies.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 24, 2008 (boomark / email).