BEIJING: A Chinese court has sentenced an American woman to three and a half years in prison and deportation on espionage charges, a rights group said on Wednesday, and her lawyer said he expects her release soon.

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 which cited government sources.

Nanning Intermediate Pe­o­p­le’s Court in the southern province of Guangxi passed the sentence on Tuesday, but the American’s next steps will not become clear until a written judgement is released, John Kamm, director of the US-based Dui Hua Fou­ndation rights group, told AFP. Phan-Gillis was currently being held in a detention centre and not a prison and did not plan to appeal, he said.

Kamm said that “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”. “I am hopeful she will be reunited with her family soon,” he added.

Her lawyer Shang Baojun confirmed the sentence and said he expected the written verdict to be issued within five days.

A US embassy spokeswoman said on Wednesday her trial was closed to the public and a request to have a consular officer attend had been refused. The spokeswoman said the US government “remained concerned” about the case and was in contact with the “highest levels” of the Chinese government about it.

Phan-Gillis was held for six months at a secret location and later at a detention centre in Guangxi, where she was initially put in solitary confinement, the working group said. Her husband has campaigned for her freedom, including a website “savesandy.org” which has now been taken down.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2017