Australian journalist Cheng Lei home after release from Chinese prison
Journalist Cheng Lei has woken up in Australia for the first time in more than three years after she was released from detention and reunited with family in Melbourne. Ms Cheng was Accused of supplying state secrets overseas and arrested in China in august 2020.
Transcript
00:00 I see someone who has been incarcerated for three years.
00:05 Chang Lei wrote last year that she gets 10 hours of sunshine a year in the years that
00:10 she was imprisoned.
00:12 She's here at home with her family.
00:14 I know there's been a very heartfelt reunion and I just want to say to her and to her entire
00:19 family our country is just so thrilled for them.
00:23 Stephen, what do we know about the circumstances of Chang Lei's release?
00:28 Very little at this stage and the Federal Government, perhaps because it's such a delicate
00:32 matter that involves so much painstaking negotiation, is very unwilling at this stage to provide
00:38 any details.
00:39 Now yesterday the Chinese Ministry of State Security said that Chang Lei had been essentially
00:45 sentenced to just under three years in jail after she pled guilty to "supplying state
00:52 secrets to an overseas entity".
00:54 Now what this entity allegedly is, exactly why the sentence was only two years and 11
01:01 months, pretty much matching precisely from the date of the time she was first detained
01:08 up until the present day just before the Prime Minister's visit to China, was not laid out.
01:13 The Chinese legal system is very opaque.
01:16 The assessment of most legal observers and most China observers here is essentially that
01:21 Chang Lei has been released because there was a political imperative to do so.
01:25 The Chinese government decided that they wanted to make a political concession to Australia
01:30 and therefore they argue we shouldn't put much stock in what the Chinese say is an independent
01:34 legal process.
01:35 Everyone who watches the Chinese system knows that this is effectively a decision that was
01:39 ordered from the top.
01:41 There's simply no independence of the legal system.
01:44 So this should primarily be seen as a political move rather than any sort of product of a
01:49 legal system, but exactly what those negotiations were, how the Australian government secured
01:55 her release, we simply don't know and it may take some time for some of those details to
02:00 come out.
02:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]