EU demands China investigate torture of lawyer and release political prisoners

Rare statement cites China’s own laws that prohibit torture in condemnation of mistreatment of detained rights lawyer Xie Yang and others.

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Lawyer Xie Yang who has been detained by Chinese authorities as part of a crack down on human rights. 

China must investigate a harrowing account of torture by a detained lawyer and release several political prisoners, the European Union has demanded in a rare statement amid a deteriorating human rights situation under Xi Jinping.
Detained rights lawyer Xie Yang detailed his treatment in detention last week, where he was beaten, forced into stress positions, denied medical care and deprived food, drink and sleep by police. 

Interrogators threatened him repeatedly, allegedly saying: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”.
Separate reports have said two other civil rights attorneys, Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang, have also been tortured while in custody.
“If verified, this mistreatment would amount to torture,” the European Union’s foreign affairs spokesperson said in a statement. 

“All necessary measures to ensure the safety and wellbeing of these individuals need to be taken.”
“If the accounts of mistreatment or torture are confirmed, this should result in the punishment of the responsible persons,” the statement added, citing China’s own laws that prohibit torture.
All three were detained in July 2015, part of an unprecedented nation-wide crackdown on human rights lawyers, legal assistants and activists. 

Nearly 250 people were targeted during the campaign, with some still held by police without trial over 18 months later.
“We reiterate our call for the release of the lawyers and human rights defenders who remain in detention, including Jiang Tianyong,” the EU statement said, referring to another lawyer who disappeared into police detention in November.
The EU applauded the release of two other rights defenders, Xie Yanyi and Li Chunfu, but for relatives there is little cause for celebration.
Li, who’s brother is Li Heping, was granted bail earlier this month and returned home. 

But relatives claim nearly 17 months of severe abuse have transformed the 44-year-old lawyer into a shadow of his former self.
“His mind is shattered,” his wife, Bi Liping, was quoted as saying in one online account of the lawyer’s ordeal. 

A local hospital offered a preliminary diagnosis of schizophrenia.
The EU statement comes just days after a group of leading lawyers and judges writing in The Guardian expressed “grave concern” over the detention of legal professionals.
“In order to vindicate its claim to be a responsible stakeholder in the international community and to be a respected global superpower, it is imperative that China honour its international commitments to international conventions and human rights,” the letter said.

“We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”

'Your only right is to obey': human rights attorney Xie Yang  describes torture in China's secret jails

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Lawyer Xie Yang before his detention by Chinese authorities. 

On day one of his detention Xie Yang was shackled to a metal chair and ordered to explain why he had joined an illegal anti-Communist party network.
On day two he was moved to a secret prison and informed: “Your only right is to obey.”
Finally, on day three, the violence began.
“We’ll torture you to death just like an ant,” one inquisitor warned the Chinese human rights lawyer during a punishing marathon of interrogation sessions and beatings designed make him confess to crimes he denies.
“I’m going to torment you until you go insane,” another captor bragged. “Don’t even imagine that you’ll be able to walk out of here and continue being a lawyer. You’re going to be a cripple.”

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The claims – which human rights activists say are consistent with previously documented forms of abuse in China – are contained in a transcript of lawyers’ interviews with one victim of the country’s ongoing crackdown on human rights attorneys.
Xie Yang, a 44-year-old lawyer, was detained in the central city of Hongjiang on 11 July 2015, on day three of what campaigners describe as an unprecedented Communist party assault on civil rights attorneys.
More than 18 months after that crackdown began, at least four of its key targets, including Xie, remain behind bars facing trial for crimes including subversion.
Xie’s legal team decided to release the explosive and highly detailed transcript of their conversations with him last week – in defiance of authorities – in protest at the refusal to set their client free.
His statement paints a devastating portrait of the tactics being used to wage China’s so-called “war on law”.
It comes after Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist who worked with several of the detained lawyers, gave the most detailed account yet of his 23-day imprisonment in an underground jail in Beijing.
Speaking to the Guardian at his new home in northern Thailand, Dahlin claimed that after being detained by state security agents in January 2016 he was deprived of sleep and forced to endure exhausting late-night interrogation sessions; denied the right to exercise, sunlight and access to his embassy; and questioned using lie-detection equipment with the Orwellian name of a “communication enhancement machine”.
“These facilities are built to break you,” Dahlin said of the covert centre where he was held under 24-hour guard in a padded cell.
In a series of interviews with his lawyers at the start of this year, Xie, whose Chinese nationality appears to have exposed him to far more brutal treatment than Dahlin, described a range of physical and mental abuse.
After being picked up by security agents on 11 July, he was taken to a police station, chained up and questioned about his involvement in an “anti-party and anti-socialist” group of lawyers.
The next day he was moved to a secret interrogation facility inside a guesthouse in the state capital, Changsha, where the torture began.
Xie was forced to sit in stress positions on a stack of plastic chairs in which it was impossible for his feet to touch the floor. 

“I had to sit there for more than 20 hours, both legs dangling in such pain until they began numb,” he recounted.
Traditional beatings were also doled out.
“They’d split up the work: one or two would grab my arms while someone used their fists to punch me in the stomach, kneed me in the stomach, or kicked me with their feet,” Xie claimed, according to a translation of his testimony published on China Change, a human rights website.
“This is a case of counterrevolution! Do you think the Communist party will let you go?” he quoted one of his captors as saying. 

“I could torture you to death and no one could help you.”
Xie, who remains in custody, claimed agents also issued thinly veiled threats against his family and friends.
“Your wife and children need to pay attention to traffic safety when they’re out in the car. There are a lot of traffic accidents these days,” one agent told him.

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Chinese authorities have not responded to Xie’s allegations and security officials rarely address such claims.
But in a recent editorial, Xinhua, Beijing’s official news agency, rejected criticism of China’s current human rights situation, which some observers describe as the worst since the days following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
“Certain western countries, while turning a blind eye to their own deep-rooted human rights issues, such as rampant gun crime, refugee crises and growing xenophobia, have a double standard on human rights, alongside a sense of superiority,” Xinhua said.
Terry Halliday, an American Bar Foundation scholar who recently published a book about China’s human rights lawyers, said the abuse described by Xie was now “par for the course” for those deemed enemies of the Chinese Communist party.
“It all rings true,” he said. 

“Nothing would surprise me about the degree to which the authorities will go in order to get the kind of response they want.
“It seems to me that part of the evil genius of the Chinese security apparatus has been that they have perfected forms of enormous pressure on individuals that are so powerful that they can compel almost any individual to comply, but yet they are not so manifest with broken bones, or the shedding of blood or external marks that can be used by the media or advocates around the world to criticise the government for inhumane treatment,” Halliday added.
“It’s torture behind a veil. We are left in the position of having to believe or not the person describing what happened to them, with very little evidence externally that allows us to validate that.”
Halliday said one case where there did appear to be clear and dramatic proof of abuse was that of Li Chunfu, another attorney who was seized during the crackdown and recently emerged from 500 days of secret detention.
Li, whose brother, Li Heping, was one of the operation’s best-known targets, was taken on 1 August 2015 during the initial wave of arrests of lawyers and activists. 

He returned home on 12 January after being granted bail.
But relatives claim nearly 17 months of severe abuse have transformed the 44-year-old lawyer into a shadow of his former self.
“His mind is shattered,” his wife, Bi Liping, is quoted as saying in one online account of the lawyer’s ordeal. 

A local hospital offered a preliminary diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Peter Dahlin and his Chinese torturers

Halliday said that in meetings Li Chunfu had always struck him as “a very poised, very articulate, sophisticated person”. 

In photographs taken following his release he was unrecognisable.
“He looked like a different man; someone a generation older. Five hundred days of total isolation. Who can withstand that?”
Xie Yang admitted that he, for one, had not been able to withstand it.
Speaking to his lawyers, he claimed he had suffered a “complete mental breakdown” and, facing a barrage of violence and threats, had caved in.
“I wanted to be done with he interrogations as quickly as possible … so whatever they wanted me to write, I wrote,” he said.
“I told them to type something up and I’d sign it, no matter what it said … I didn’t want to go on living.”

Rule by Fear and Torture

A tortured, broken lawyer and a hawkish judge cast deep pall over China’s legal system

By Simon Denyer

Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court, gives a report during the third plenary meeting of the National People's Congress, at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, March 13.

BEIJING — For 500 days, Li Chunfu, once a lively and tough human rights lawyer, was kept in secret detention by China’s Communist Party. 

When he was finally released last Thursday, his wife was so shocked she could hardly believe her eyes.
Instead of her 44-year-old husband, stood a thin, pale and sick man who looked as if he was in his 70s, Bi Liping said, a fearful and paranoid person who seemed to have been broken by the system.
A Beijing hospital soon gave him a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Li was one of 300 lawyers and advocates who were rounded up in a crackdown in July 2015: although most were soon released, two have been sentenced and four remain in detention.
In statements to the China Change website, relatives and fellow lawyers said Li had been severely tortured and drugged during detention.
But his story is not the only one to have cast a dark shadow over the rule of law in China this month.
In a remarkable speech on Saturday, the chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court told provincial judges to resist “erroneous” Western ideals of judicial independence, constitutional democracy and the separation of powers.
“One needs to have a clear-cut stand, and dare to show the sword against them, to struggle against any erroneous words and actions that deny the leadership of the Communist Party, or slander the rule of law and the judicial system of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Zhou Qiang said.
While the idea that the Communist Party is in firm control of the legal system is hardly new, to see the idea of judicial independence so explicitly condemned by the country’s topmost judge, a man once seen as a reformer keen on limiting officials’ power over local courts, came as a shock to many people.
Two open letters are circulating expressing outrage at Zhou’s remarks, one signed by 23 lawyers, and another signed by 155 leading liberal intellectuals.
“In the past few years, the legal community has been working hard toward establishing an independent judicial system,” said Lin Liguo, a former lawyer based in Shanghai, who wrote the lawyers’ letter and said Zhou’s remarks had burst reformers’ optimism.
“What Zhou said is basically that we don’t need judicial independence at all,” he said. 

“That’s why people are so upset.”
At a key meeting in October 2014, the party’s top leaders promised to give judges more independence from interference by local officials, while Xi Jinping has often pledged to strengthen the rule of law — while at the same time underlining that the Communist Party remains firmly in control and effectively above the law.
Yet such was the controversy stirred by Zhou’s remarks that the Supreme Court issued five separate social media posts on Sunday and Monday, each hundreds of words long, explaining and amplifying his remarks. 

At first, they attracted hundreds of comments from ordinary people, until censors shut down the comment function.
In a blog post, Jerome Cohen, an expert in Chinese law at New York University School of Law, called it “the most enormous ideological setback for decades of halting, uneven progress towards the creation of a professional, impartial judiciary.”
He said there was “enormous dissatisfaction among many judges at the restrictive, anti-Western legal values being imposed by Xi Jinping, with many younger officials leaving the courts and procuracy for work in law firms, business and teaching.”
Eva Pils, an expert in transnational law at King’s College, London said Zhou’s speech had come as a “real shock” to people in the legal system who had been educated to believe that China was striving for better rule of law, and who found it unacceptable that their country was “departing so completely and so rapidly from the reform path.”
It is, in other words, one more nail in the coffin of the idea that China’s legal and political system would ultimately move in a more liberal direction, experts said.
“I think that lots of people are still in denial about this departure from the reform path, and the turn to rule by fear, and that they are unwilling to consider the full implications of the new rhetoric,” Pils said.
Experts said Zhou may have come under pressure to publicly declare his loyalty to the party, especially as a team from the Communist Party’s anti-corruption arm had been reportedly carrying out an inspection of the Supreme Court since mid-November — or to have his appointment renewed at a major party congress in October.
But Zhou’s words still came across as particularly strident, as he insisted on the importance of “ideological work,” and recommended judges “severely strike” at people who use the Internet to endanger national security — code for undermining the Communist Party.
He also recommended judges protect the images of leaders, heroes and historical figures, “to resolutely safeguard the glorious history of the Party and the People’s Army.”
Zhou’s warning chimes with Xi’s campaign against “historical nihilism — questioning the Communist Party’s heroic account of its own history. 

In the past few weeks alone, a Chinese professor and a government official were both sacked, and a television producer was suspended, for criticizing Mao Zedong, who is officially revered as the founder of modern China even though he presided over the deaths of tens of millions of people in a famine during the Great Leap Forward and unimaginable cruelty during the Cultural Revolution.
The case of lawyer Li has underlined what happens to people who dare to challenge the party.
Li grew up poor in China’s central Henan province, dropping out of school at 14 to work in factories but then spending six grueling years studying in his spare time to follow in his brother’s footsteps to become a lawyer.
Maya Wang at Human Rights Watch said it was unclear what he was supposed to have done wrong — perhaps demonstrating outside a police bureau in Heilongjiang in 2014 to demand access to his client, perhaps being the brother of Li Heping, a well-known civil rights lawyer who was also detained in July 2015, or perhaps simply being tarred as an agent of a hostile foreign government.
But what broke him is no mystery, she said in a statement, citing how suspects are frequently beaten, hung by their wrists and deprived of sleep, as well as subject to indefinite isolation and threats to their families.
Lawyer Chen Jiangang said Li had lost around 30 lbs. in detention. 

He described his close friend’s mental health as worrying.
“He is constantly in doubt and fear after his release,” Chen said. 

“He is always fearful of police showing up to take him away. He is always fearful of leaving the house. Even when he is surrounded by family and friends, he still keeps asking ‘are they coming to get me?’”
Human Rights Watch’s Wang said China will have “zero credibility on rule of law” so long as individuals are tortured with impunity. 

“Li will likely never be the same after this horrific experience — and neither should Beijing,” she said.