Phan Phan-Gillis arrived in Los Angeles late Friday after a flight from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, her husband, Jeff Gillis, said in an emailed statement. Her departure came after a Chinese court on Tuesday ordered her to be imprisoned for 3½ years and deported, following a closed-door trial.
The 57-year-old business consultant, who goes by the name “Sandy,” was “overjoyed to be reunited with friends and family, and sends out her thanks to the many people who worked tirelessly for her release,” said Mr. Gillis, who plans to spend the next few days in Los Angeles with his wife.
A U.S. State Department official confirmed Ms. Phan-Gillis’s deportation, saying “the United States welcomes her home.” China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t immediately respond to queries.
Ms. Phan-Gillis is the second American recently freed by an authoritarian government, following Egypt’s release of Egyptian-American aid worker Aya Hijazi this month. Some rights activists say these cases potentially mark a shift in focus in U.S. human-rights policy to put greater priority on cases involving American citizens.
Ms. Phan-Gillis’s detention had simmered through most of the last two years of the Obama administration, before a warming of U.S.-China ties under President Donald Trump offered a chance of progress. U.S. officials discussed her case with Chinese counterparts during preparations for a summit with President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.
China has often applied broad definitions of national security when prosecuting such crimes, and foreign nationals have in the past fallen foul of the law.
Ms. Phan-Gillis, who was born in Vietnam and is of Chinese descent, ran a business consultancy in Houston and often traveled to China as part of her work promoting bilateral cultural and business links. She was taken into custody in March 2015 while traveling through the coastal city of Zhuhai as part of a business delegation from Houston, according to her husband and delegation members.
Chinese prosecutors accused her of conducting espionage while visiting China in 1996 and, while back in America, helping U.S. authorities capture two Chinese spies and recruit them as double agents in 1997 and 1998, Mr. Gillis said in his statement. He denied those charges and said his wife’s passport shows she didn’t travel to China in 1996.
At her trial, Ms. Phan-Gillis pleaded guilty and made no other statement, according to her lawyer, Shang Baojun. The judge didn’t say that her deportation would be imposed “in addition to” imprisonment, an omission that suggested she wouldn’t have to serve her prison sentence first, Mr. Shang said.
During her detention, Ms. Phan-Gillis was denied direct contact with her family, apart from a video call with her father just before her trial, and wasn’t allowed to meet her lawyers for more than a year, according to her husband and people familiar with her case, though Chinese authorities permitted her a monthly meeting with U.S. consular officials.
In April 2016, a panel of United Nations experts raised concerns about apparent human-rights violations against Ms. Phan-Gillis, saying she was being subjected to “arbitrary detention” because Chinese officials hadn’t brought her before judicial authorities or given her access to legal counsel since detaining her in March 2015. A detention is considered arbitrary if detainees are deprived of basic rights such as a fair trial and access to legal representation.
Ms. Phan-Gillis was first allowed to meet her lawyers in May 2016, according to the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that monitors and advocates for those detained in China.
She was brought before a judge for the first time this month for a pretrial hearing, Mr. Gillis said.
China’s Foreign Ministry criticized the U.N. report at the time, saying Ms. Phan-Gillis was well treated and had her rights protected.
Source: Wall Street Journal By Chun Han Wong
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