As the year ends, ALN is releasing a statement on eight ways in which rights lawyers in China have continued to face arbitrary detention, harassment, and repression in 2023. A PDF version of the statement is also available from here.
As 2023 ends, this article highlights eight important or recent developments in the arbitrary detention, harassment, and repression of rights lawyers and activists in China and Hong Kong over the last year.
The context remains the hostile environment for rights lawyers and human rights defenders created by President Xi Jinping and his administration since the early years of his rule, characterized by “rule by law” authoritarianism, that is, by crackdowns on all potential oppositional actors, including (especially) rights lawyers assisting such oppositional actors, through “legal” procedures ostensibly in the name of “upholding law and order”.[1] However, these procedures themselves are designed to allow for easy abuse by authorities, such as language that is vague or easily manipulated, and they lack in any protection against abuse. Extrajudicial or extralegal abuses also occur as well, with the government often simply denying such abuses exist at all. The 709 crackdown, a nationwide series of arrests and interrogations involving over 300 lawyers and activists that started on 9 July 2015 was one of the major early events characterizing the current period.
One of the key international standards violated by these measures is UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, particularly Principle 16, which states that:
Governments shall ensure that lawyers (a) are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference; (b) are able to travel and to consult with their clients freely both within their own country and abroad; and (c) shall not suffer, or be threatened with, prosecution or administrative, economic or other sanctions for any action taken in accordance with recognized professional duties, standards and ethics.[2]
1. The practice of RSDL, enforced disappearances, and torture
Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) is a form of detention at a special facility run by the public or state security bureaus of China, such as a converted hotel or hospital, sometimes euphemistically called a “training center”. The current legal basis is the 2018 amendments of Arts. 75-79 of China’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), which allow residential surveillance for up to six months at residences that are not the detainee’s home, but any place designated by police. Under the RSDL system, police disappear a person and place them in the location, often without informing their family despite CPL Art. 75 requiring the police to inform the family within 24 hours. The person is also given no ability to contact their family and in practice their right to a lawyer is restricted for national security related charges, leading to incommunicado detention. The NGO ISHR has estimated that between 53,000 to 90,000 individuals have been enforced disappeared under the RSDL system.[3]
A great majority of the lawyers and HRDs that have been detained in China since the 709 Crackdown began their detention in RSDL. Reports of torture and other abuses in RSDL detention are widespread.[4] The idea is that torture early in the detention process allows authorities to obtain a confession of guilt, ostensibly allowing them to be more easily be arrested and convicted, despite ignoring that Chinese law does not allow confessions extracted from torture to be admissible at trial. Since the person is held incommunicado for at least six months, this allows wounds from torture to heal somewhat before a person is seen by family members, friends, or lawyers, ostensibly allowing the government to more easily deny any report of torture. Because the family members have no information and don’t know what happened to their family member, it also instills fear and trauma into the human rights and legal community.
Lawyers that have faced abuses in RSDL detention include Xu Zhiyong, Ding Jiaxi, Li Yuhan, Qin Yongpei, Chen Jiahong, Chang Weiping, Tang Jitian, Xie Yang, and Yu Wensheng, as well as other rights activists including Xu Yan, Li Qiaochu, Huang Xueqin, Wang Jianbing, and Guo Feixiong (the pen name of Yang Maodong).
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https://29principles.uk/en/jshkaw
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-liqiaochu-trial-12212023163516.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67769163
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