American woman convicted of spying by Chinese court
Sandy Phan-Gillis accused of stealing state secrets and was sentenced by court in Nanning on Tuesday, according to a US-based rights group
A Chinese court has sentenced an American woman to 3½ years in prison and deportation on espionage charges, a US-based rights group said Wednesday, although details about her fate remain unclear.
Sandy Phan-Gillis was detained in March 2015 at the Macau border after visiting mainland China with a trade delegation from the Texas oil capital Houston.
She was accused of espionage and stealing state secrets for allegedly passing intelligence to a third party, according to previous reports from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that cited unnamed government sources.
Nanning Intermediate People’s Court in the southern region of Guangxi issued the sentence on Tuesday, but the American’s next steps will not become clear until a written judgement is released at an unknown future date, the Dui Hua Foundation director John Kamm said.
Phan-Gillis is currently held in a detention centre, not a prison, and did not plan to appeal, he said.
Kamm said “adjusted for time spent in residential surveillance in a designated location, she has already served more than half her sentence and is accordingly eligible for parole as well as medical parole, commutation and immediate deportation”.
