Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), a non-governmental human rights organization, released a report Wednesday that found more than 1,500 people have been arbitrarily detained by the Chinese Communist government over the past six years in a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent.
CHRD’s report on repression in China, “In a Prison Cell Waiting for Daybreak,” followed up on conclusions reached by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2017 that wrongful detention in China had reached the scale of a crime against humanity.
“Every element of the Chinese criminal justice system — the police, procuratorate, and courts — is implicated in locking people away on baseless charges in blatant violation of the government’s domestic and international human rights obligations,” said CHRD Co-Executive Director Sophie Richardson.
“Posting critical comments online, advocating for civil liberties, and speaking out against human rights abuses are not crimes,” Richardson said.
CHRD documented 1,545 “prisoners of conscience” in China who were “sentenced and imprisoned on charges that stem from laws that are not in conformity with the Chinese government’s domestic and international human rights obligations.”
“Women activists and marginalized communities, including Tibetans and Uyghurs, number disproportionately higher among those wrongfully detained. Of the over 700 older prisoners of conscience, defined as over the age of 60, two-thirds are women,” the report said.
“Human rights experts and international experts have raised that people over the age of 60 should generally not be held in custody due to the effects on their physical and mental health,” CHRD research consultant Angeli Datt told Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Thursday.
“That two-thirds of them are women was really shocking to me,” Datt added.
Many of the arrests were made in Hong Kong, where a massive pro-democracy movement flourished in 2019 and was ruthlessly crushed in 2020, using an outrageous new “national security law” that criminalized virtually all criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and its Hong Kong puppet government.
CHRD highlighted the Chinese Communist regime’s merciless abuse of its favorite all-purpose charge for silencing dissidents, “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” an absurdly broad criminal charge that has been denounced by the United Nations and human rights groups around the world.
Less well-known internationally, but also favored by Chinese Communist officials as cudgels against dissent, were the charges of “organizing and using a cult to undermine implementation of the law” and “endangering national security.”
The former is handy for jailing religious figures Beijing dislikes, while the latter became an effective tool for shutting down all political organizations except for the Chinese Communist Party. As the CHRD report pointed out, China jailed dozens of people for simply participating in a primary election in Hong Kong.
“Beijing’s frequent use of national security charges shows the leadership’s reliance on the legal system as an instrument of political suppression, and its use of arbitrary detention nationwide demonstrates the widespread, systematic nature of the abuses,” CHRD said.
The report argued that China got away with industrial-scale abuse of human rights on its own soil for so long that it felt emboldened to crank up its machinery of transnational repression.
“The impunity Chinese government officials enjoy at home emboldens them to commit abuses abroad,” CHRD warned. A recent story highlighting such concerns is Thailand’s indefensible decision to ship 40 Uyghurs back to China in late February, potentially delivering them to Chinese Communist jailers and torturers.
The report concluded with a lengthy set of recommendations for the Chinese government, other nations concerned with the human rights of the Chinese people, and the United Nations. One of these recommendations was to constantly pressure Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and his top officials to release the 1,545 prisoners of conscience profiled by the CHRD.
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