China's pioneering cyber-dissident Huang Qi, one of the first to be arrested for expressing his political views on the Internet, has been sentenced to five years in prison for subversion, lawyers and a rights group said.
Huang was convicted on May 9 by an intermediate court in central China's Chongqing municipality in a trial that began in January 2001, his lawyer Fan Jun told AFP.
"As far as my own personal opinion is concerned there was not enough evidence in the trial to warrant a guilty verdict," Fan told AFP.
"The ruling also took too long; in accordance with the law a verdict should have been reached the year before last."
Huang was arrested in June 2000 and charged with subversion in January 2001.
He has been in prison since June 2000 when he was arrested for publishing political information on his website -- www.6-4tianwang.com.
The website originally listed information on people that had gone missing, but soon became a site that listed people who had disappeared into police custody, usually for their own political or religious beliefs.
The site carried reports on dissidents, the separatist movement in northwest Xinjiang province, the banned Falungong sect and the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests of June 1989.
Huang, 40, was tried in secret on August 17, 2001.
Evidence used to convict Huang included his posting of the charter of the outlawed China Democracy Party on his website and the opinions of other political and religious groups in China that face persecution by the communist government.