Interpol Tragicomedy

Meng Hongwei faces indefinite detention in system experts say is cover for a purge of political rivals
By Lily Kuo in Beijing
 

Meng Hongwei appears to be the latest target of the Chinese ruling Communist party’s controversial anti-corruption campaign. 

The bizarre case of the former Interpol president Meng Hongwei, now detained and under investigation in China, has raised concerns about the country’s expanded anti-corruption drive.
Meng, a senior Chinese security official, appears to be the latest target in a far-reaching anti-graft campaign that critics say is a cover for eliminating political figures disloyal to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

On Monday, days after Meng was reported missing by his wife, Chinese authorities accused him of bribery in a lengthy statement stressing the importance of the country’s “anti-corruption struggle” and the need for “absolute loyal political character”. 

On Sunday, authorities said Meng was in the custody of the National Supervisory Commission (NSC), China’s new super-agency charged with investigating corruption throughout the government, which is overseeing his case.
Human rights advocates say Meng is likely being held in liuzhi or “retention in custody” – a form of detention used by the NSC that denies detainees access to legal counsel or families for as long as six months.
Liuzhi is meant to be an improvement on the previous shuanggui system, a disciplinary process within the ruling Chinese Communist party known for the use of torture and other abuses. 

Under liuzhi, family members are supposed to be notified.
Rights advocates say there are few indications liuzhi will be much better. 

The Chinese journalist Chen Jieren, who had accused a party official in Hunan province of corruption, has been detained since July by the NSC and denied access to his lawyer, according to Radio Free Asia.
In May, the driver of a low-ranking official in Fujian province died during interrogation after almost a month in liuzhi. 

When family members saw his body, his face was disfigured.
“Liuzhi ’is a very new system, but we can speculate pretty clearly [about] the kind of treatment people are subjected to,” says Michael Caster, a human rights advocate with Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. 

“Prolonged sleep deprivation, forced malnourishment, stress positions, beatings, psychological abuse, threats to family members certainly, oftentimes leading to forced confessions.”
Meng’s case is the most high-profile yet for the NSC, which was created in March to expand China’s anti-corruption drive to people and entities outside the Communist party, including government ministries, state-owned companies, and people working in the public sector.
“Since its inauguration, however, the NSC has not nabbed any big ‘tigers’, so to speak,” said Dimitar Gueorguiev, assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, where he focuses on Chinese governance. 

“Meng’s arrest seems like a powerful demonstration of China’s commitment to rooting out corruption, even when it can cost them the directorship of an important international vehicle,” he said.
Speculation for the reasons behind Meng’s swift downfall ranges from his access to sensitive information after a long career at the public security ministry to his tenure at Interpol, when the organisation revoked an international alert for Dolkun Isa, the president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, which is critical of China’s treatment of ethnic Uighurs in East Turkestan. 

While Meng’s exact whereabouts are still unclear, rights activists say his fate is not.
“The formula is simple,” says Maya Wang, a senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Like others forcibly disappeared before him, including human rights activists mistreated in custody by Meng’s public security ministry, he faces detention until he confesses under duress, an unfair trial, and then harsh imprisonment, possibly for many years.”

Rogue Nation

How China Uses Forced Confessions as Propaganda Tool
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BEIJING — In the unpolished video that appeared on state television one October morning in 2015, Wang Yu, one of China’s most prominent lawyers, denounces her own son.
While she was herself under arrest, the young man had been detained after leaving the country without permission or the proper papers. 

He first flew to the southern province of Yunnan and then rode on the back of a motorcycle into Myanmar, his movements captured on closed circuit cameras.
“I strongly condemn this type of behavior,” Ms. Wang says in a monotone, sitting inside a featureless room. 

“This kind of action is very risky and is illegal.”
It was all a lie, as her colleagues suspected when the video first aired.
Ms. Wang’s videotaped contrition was merely an example of how the Chinese authorities routinely coerce detainees into making statements that serve the government’s propaganda needs.
A human rights organization, Safeguard Defenders, has now detailed her case and others like it to draw attention to a practice it says violates fundamental due process and international legal standards — and to call out the media organizations in China and in Hong Kong that abet the practice by circulating the “confessions” and in some cases even participating in them.
Critics have long assumed these televised acts of confession and contrition were frauds. 

The organization’s report, released this week, analyzes 45 high-profile examples recorded and broadcast between July 2013 and February 2018.
More than half of them involved lawyers, journalists and others involved in promoting human rights in China. 

Many were shown “confessing” even though the formal legal proceedings against them had not yet begun, ignoring the presumption of innocence that is embedded even in Chinese law.
In 12 cases, the organization’s researchers interviewed those who were forced to record confessions, documenting in detail how the videos were carefully scripted and then broadcast.
What follows are examples of how the security forces use the confessions to demonstrate their raw jurisdictional power and to score propaganda points in an effort to deflect criticism at home and abroad. 

They ultimately show how powerless detainees are once they are swept into the Chinese legal system.
“I don’t expect everyone to understand,” Ms. Wang said, explaining the agonizing decision she made to agree to the interrogators’ demands in exchange for her release. 

“I just want to say that my son is everything to me. Perhaps I had no other choice.”

Confessions send a message
Lam Wing-kee was the manager of Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong, a store that sold titles that displeased the authorities in Beijing. 

In 2015, he was arrested as he crossed the border from Hong Kong to the mainland, swept up in a series of cases against booksellers that continue to reverberate in Hong Kong, the special administrative region of China feeling the heavy hand of the central government.
Mr. Lam reappeared in February 2016 on Chinese television, where he “confessed” that his books — which included titillating descriptions of the private lives of Chinese leaders — were sensationalized and misleading.
In the report, Mr. Lam told researchers that he had to make a dozen recordings before those holding him were satisfied. 

He said they were made to seem like interviews and, in one case, a court proceeding, with a police officer posing as a witness. 

When Mr. Lam was released, he held an explosive news conference in Hong Kong, after which the authorities broadcast more recordings in an effort to embarrass him further.
Confessions are “much more than simple admissions of guilt,” the report said. 

They are meant as warnings to others who would challenge the state, and to discredit accusations of abuses of power by the Communist Party or the state security organs.
“China’s televised confessions are reminiscent of violent and degrading episodes of political persecution from history,” the report added, noting Stalin’s show trials and the public shaming sessions that were characteristic of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Deflecting international criticism
Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen, was another of the booksellers caught up in the sweep in 2015. In his case, he was abducted from his vacation home in Thailand and returned to China. 

There he faced charges under mysterious circumstances that provoked international condemnation and the involvement of the government of Sweden.
Mr. Gui has since appeared in three recorded videos. 

In the first, he declared that he had returned voluntarily, which his relatives and colleagues strongly dispute.
The latest, shown in February, came after a bizarre turn of events. 

Mr. Gui, who was released from prison last year but kept under close scrutiny in the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai, was arrested in January aboard a train traveling to Beijing while he was accompanied by Swedish diplomats, who were ostensibly escorting him to medical treatment.
In a video broadcast on state television, Mr. Gui appeared tense, often pausing or repeating himself, saying that the Swedes were using him as a pawn. 

He was also shown being interviewed by the media in Hong Kong. 

The video here appeared on the website of The South China Morning Post. 

The newspaper faced criticism for its role but later said the interview was done without preconditions, with the "cooperation" of the authorities.
Mr. Gui’s daughter, Angela, who has campaigned for his release, told the report’s researchers that it was painful to watch. 

“It’s the kind of thing nobody should ever have to experience,” she said, “so there shouldn’t be words for it.”

Born to Kill

China remains world's biggest executioner: Amnesty

AFP

BEIJING -- China executed more people in 2016 than all other nations combined, Amnesty International said Tuesday, even as death penalties in the world decreased overall.
The human rights organisation estimates the Asian giant alone killed "thousands" of people, a figure based on examinations of court records and news reports.
All other countries together executed at least 1,032 people last year -- a decline of 37 percent compared to 2015. 

Of those, 87 percent took place in just four Muslim countries -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.
Amnesty's report found that hundreds of death sentences, including cases involving foreign nationals, had been omitted from China's public database of court verdicts, suggesting a concerted effort to hide the extent of the country's killings.
The ruling Communist Party considers the death toll a state secret.
"China is the only country that has such a complete regime of secrecy over executions," Amnesty's East Asia director Nicholas Bequelin said at a press conference in Hong Kong.
"Probably the reason is the numbers are shockingly high, and China doesn't want to be a complete outlier in the world," he said.
Despite local media reports saying at least 931 individuals were executed between 2014 and 2016, only 85 of them were in the online database, Amnesty said.
In 2013, China's Supreme People's Court ruled that legal judgements should be made public, but the decision included many exceptions, including cases involving "state secrets" or personal privacy.
Previous estimates from other rights groups also put the number of annual executions in China in the thousands.
Chinese courts have a conviction rate of 99.92 percent, and concerns over wrongful verdicts are fuelled by police reliance on forced confessions and the lack of effective defence in criminal trials.
The nation's top judge, Zhou Qiang, apologised in 2015 for past miscarriages of justice and said mistakes must be corrected.
In December 2016, a Chinese court cleared a man executed 21 years ago for murder, citing insufficient evidence in the original trial.
However experts say recent reforms have not been widely implemented.
"For example, coerced confessions are supposed to be excluded from evidence. In practise, however, the police have unchallenged discretion to... extract confessions by detaining and torturing suspects for long periods," New York University professor Jerome Cohen told AFP.
"Yet even the late Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, the greatest executioner in human history, recognised the likelihood of mistakes when imposing the death penalty," Cohen noted.

China eliminating civil society by targeting human rights activists

Report details use of torture by Chinese security agencies – including beatings, stress positions and sleep deprivation – to force activists to confess ‘crimes’
By Benjamin Haas In Hong Kong

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

China’s human rights situation further deteriorated last year as police systematically tortured activists and forcibly disappeared government critics while state TV continued to broadcast forced confessions, a new report shows.
A creeping security state also attempted to codify much of its existing behaviour on paper, giving the police legal authority to criminalise a host of NGOs deemed politically sensitive by the authorities, according to the report by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
“The Chinese government seems intent on eliminating civil society through a combination of new legislation restricting the funding and operations of NGOs, and the criminalisation of human rights activities as a so-called threat to national security,” Frances Eve, a researcher at CHRD, told the Guardian.
“What stands out is the institutionalised use of torture to force defenders to confess that their legitimate and peaceful human rights work is somehow a ‘crime’.”
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

In 2015, police targeted almost 250 rights lawyers and activists in a “war on law”, and the effects of that campaign continued to be felt throughout last year.
Reports of torture while in detention in 2016 were rampant, with methods including beatings, attacks by fellow inmates on the orders of prison guards, stress positions, deprivation of food, water and sleep, inhumane conditions and deprivation of medical treatment.
In some cases, human rights activists were prevented from receiving medical care even once they were released.
Huang Yan, who was detained in November 2015, was suffering from ovarian cancer and diabetes. Police confiscated her diabetes medication, and despite an exam done at a detention facility in April 2016 showing the cancer had spread, she was not treated and was denied medical bail.
When she was finally released, Huang was scheduled to undergo surgery last November to treat her cancer, but the authorities pressured the hospital and the team of surgeons declined to treat her.
Torture also took more overt forms. 

Last year reports also emerged that rights lawyer Xie Yang was subject to beatings and stress positions in detention, with interrogators warning him: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”.
In November 2016, Jiang Tianyong, a respected Christian attorney, disappeared while about to board a train and police waited weeks to confirm he had been detained. 

Jiang’s whereabouts are still a mystery nearly three months later.
In a rare strongly-worded statement, the European Union called for his immediate release along with several other lawyers.
China also continued the practice of airing confessions on state television, a move that is reminiscent of internal Communist party political purges.
In one of the most prominent cases, Swedish NGO worker Peter Dahlin was paraded on the national broadcaster after three weeks in detention, declaring: “I have violated Chinese law through my activities here. I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”
The confessions air before detainees ever see the inside of a courtroom, and in Dahlin’s case he was promptly deported.
For those activists that do go to trial, in at least 15 cases last year police attempted to pressure activists into accepting government-appointed lawyers. 

In cases where state-appointed lawyers represented human rights activists, little defence was mounted and the accused pleaded guilty and promised not to appeal their cases.
The report also outlined two laws passed in 2016 that are likely to curb civil society: legislation regulating charitable giving and a law on foreign NGOs. 

The charity law, while not explicitly requiring all NGOs to register with the government, makes it difficult for unregistered organisations to raise funds domestically.
The foreign NGO regulations require overseas groups that give money to Chinese organisations to be registered with the police.
“Together, these laws will hamper the development of Chinese civil society by restricting their funding,” the CHRD report said.
“There are no more ‘grey areas’,” an unnamed human rights activist said in the report. 

“To advocate for human rights in China today, you must be willing to accept the reality that the government views your work as ‘illegal’.”

U.S. Solidarity for Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act

Congress moves to sanction officials who suppress the city’s rights.
The Wall Street Journal

Hong Kong democracy leader Joshua Wong was in Washington on Wednesday, where he met with Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, the latter of whom used the occasion to introduce the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. 

The more China violates its promise to respect Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy, the more this bill will gain support in Congress.
The Cotton-Rubio bill would reaffirm the principles of the 1992 United States-Hong Kong Policy Act, including support for democratization and human rights. 

It would also reinstate the requirement that the State Department issue a yearly report on Hong Kong, and that the Secretary of State certify that Hong Kong is sufficiently autonomous from Beijing before pursing new agreements extending preferential treatment to the territory.
Likeliest to earn attention in Hong Kong and Beijing is the provision imposing sanctions on officials who have suppressed basic freedoms in Hong Kong, including those “responsible for the surveillance, abduction, detention, or forced confessions of certain booksellers and journalists.” 

These officials would lose access to U.S. visas and see U.S.-based assets frozen.
Donald Trump hasn’t shown much appreciation for the importance of human rights to U.S. foreign policy. 

He tweeted during Hong Kong’s mass pro-democracy demonstrations of 2014, “President Obama should stay out of the Hong Kong protests, we have enough problems in our own country!”
Mr. Wong, who helped lead those protests at age 18, appealed Wednesday to the President-elect: “Being a businessman I hope Donald Trump could know the dynamics in Hong Kong and know that to maintain the business sector benefits in Hong Kong, it’s necessary to fully support human rights in Hong Kong to maintain the independence and the rule of law.”
No one—perhaps even Mr. Trump—knows how his foreign policy will evolve, but Congress is likely to assert itself more than it has, especially on human rights. 

Mr. Wong’s warm welcome on Capitol Hill is a signal to Beijing that reneging on its promises to Hong Kong won’t be cost-free.