Criminal Office

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Discloses Names of Chinese Dissidents to Beijing
BY EVA FU

The United Nations Human Rights Council on June 26, 2019. 

Emma Reilly, a UN employee who first alleged the practice in 2013, said in an Oct. 21 letter to senior U.S. diplomats and members of Congress, “The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) continues to provide China with advance information on whether named human rights defenders plan to attend meetings" in Geneva. 

A United Nations whistleblower has accused the organization’s human rights agency of endangering Chinese rights activists by disclosing their names to the Chinese regime.
“The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) apparently continues to provide China with advance information on whether named human rights defenders plan to attend meetings (in Geneva),” Emma Reilly, a human rights officer at the OHCHR, said in an Oct. 21 letter to U.S. congress members and senior officials, Fox News reported on Dec. 14.
The list of names provided to the Chinese authorities included Tibetan and Uyghur activists, some of whom are U.S. citizens or residents.
Reilly said that the practice has continued since 2013.

Reilly, an Irish and British dual national, also accused the organization of retaliating against her in response to the complaints.“Instead of taking action to stop names being handed over, the UN has focused its energy on retaliating against me for daring to report it. I have been ostracized, publicly defamed, deprived of functions, and my career has been left in tatters,” Reilly said.
She also said the UN approved of Beijing’s request for the name list even though it denied a similar request from Turkey.
According to Washington-based non-profit Government Accountability Project, Reilly first raised objections to the handover of dissidents’ names in early 2013 through an internal report. 

She said in response to an inquiry from the Chinese UN ambassador, she and other staff were instructed to provide information on whether 13 human rights activists were planning to attend a Human Rights Council session.
Reilly had also reported such practices to senior staff members and through other internal channels, but saw no immediate action from the organization until the Irish government intervened in 2016, the Government Accountability Project said.

OHCHR helped China arrest and kill Cao Shunli
The advocacy group further noted the disappearance of Chinese lawyer and activist Cao Shunli at a Beijing airport in September 2013, while Cao was on her way for a UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva. 

The arrest took place six months after Reilly’s first internal report. 

Cao died in detention in China six months later after being denied medical treatment.
Reilly had suffered from a range of reprisals due to her speaking up, including being discriminated for promotion, excluded from meetings, and receiving prejudicial performance evaluations.
Responding to Gomez’s comments, Reilly said that the UN has “consistently refused to act” on her request to “stop this horrific practice.”
“When Chinese dissidents come to the UN to speak out about human rights abuses, the last thing they expect is for the UN to report them to China,” she said.

Chinese Influence at the UN
Concerns over the Chinese regime’s influence at the United Nations Human Rights Council have been mounting in recent years.
In July, the Chinese delegate twice interrupted Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho during her testimony at the council, during which she appealed to the UN to remove China from the organization and speak up for Hong Kong, a city embroiled in protests since June in opposition to growing political interference from Beijing.
In November 2018, eight non-profit groups in a joint statement expressed concerns after the United Nations Human Rights Council removed at least seven of their submissions in a report for consideration by UN member states ahead of a review of Beijing’s human rights record. 

The groups voiced concern that the submissions were objected to by the Chinese Communist Party.
In April 2017, security officials at the UN headquarters in New York expelled a prominent Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa from the premise without explanation. 

Later in 2018, the former Under-Secretary-General for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Wu Hongbo, revealed in an interview with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV that he had personally ordered the activist’s expulsion.
“As a Chinese diplomat, we can’t be a bit careless when it comes to issues relating to China’s national sovereignty and national interests,” Wu said at the time.
The Chinese regime has detained an estimated more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan in a massive campaign to combat purported “extremism.”

In January 2017, ahead of a keynote speech from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping at the UN European headquarters in Geneva, UN officials deployed rare stringent security arrangements, shutting down parking lots and meeting rooms, and sending home early its roughly 3,000 staff members. 

Small pro-Tibet protests near the site were also declared unauthorized.
Ted Piccone, senior fellow at Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution, warned that the Chinese regime is “playing the long game” in regards to human rights and reshaping the international system to its advantage.
“Without a well thought out and long-term counter-balancing strategy, China’s growing economic leverage will probably allow it to achieve its objectives”—defending its “authoritarian system of one-party control” and exporting its values that undermine international human rights system, Piccone wrote in a 2018 report.
“The result would be a weaker international human rights system in which independent voices are muffled and public criticism of egregious abuses muted behind the banner of national sovereignty.”

Chinese Doublespeak

‘Human rights with Chinese characteristics’ are in fact crimes against humanity
By Omer Kanat

In 2017, three days before Human Rights Day on December 10, Beijing hosted the ‘South-South Human Rights Forum.’

The event took place as the Chinese authorities were interning vast numbers of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in concentration camps. 

More than 300 delegates from 70 countries attended. 

The outcome document, the ‘Beijing Declaration,’ affirmed states should “choose a human rights development path or guarantee model that suits its specific conditions.” 

In sum, China sought an international clearance for the concept of ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ sublimating individual and collective freedoms to the needs of the state.

The world is learning quickly about the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of human rights. 

In East Turkestan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Southern Mongolia, Taiwan, and China’s heartland, the Chinese government has met any opposition with repression and destabilization. 

Indeed, the application of the latest technologies to create a pervasive system of surveillance indicates the party has taken the step of preempting any resistance to its authoritarian rule. 

The recent leaks of government documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times lay bare how the party intends to commit cultural genocide against the Uyghur people through “no mercy” policies.
The label ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ is a misnomer. 

It is how the Chinese Communist Party attempts to entangle the interests of Chinese people with the logics of their continued power. 

If it was at all possible, just ask any one of the imprisoned Chinese human rights lawyers how they feel about “the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and human rights protection.” 

However, the imposition of the party’s vision of human rights does not stop at China’s borders. 

The profitable export of surveillance technology enables states to restrict the fundamental human rights of individuals on every continent.

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uighurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese East Turkestan colony and ask for the closure of “re-education center” where Uighurs are detained, during a demonstration around the EU institutions in Brussels on April 27, 2018. 

Human Rights Day commemorates the day the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a foundational document outlining rights standards and translated into over 500 languages, including Uyghur. 

It’s worth revisiting the 30 articles of the UDHR. 

From Article 5, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” to Article 9, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” to Article 20, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” China is in open violation of these fundamental rights in regards to the Uyghur people.
It is, therefore, no surprise the Chinese government is actively subverting the concept of universal human rights by cooking up its own version. 

Since 2017, evidence of mass arbitrary detention and torture of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples has become indisputable. 

The Chinese government has rationalized these crimes against humanity within the logics of ‘vocational training,’ as if the systemic ethnocide of their people was somehow in the interests of the Uyghurs.

File photo posted by the East Turkestan Judicial Administration to its WeChat account. 

However, the Chinese Communist Party does not limit the spread of its concept of human rights to events such as the South-South Human Rights Forum. 

More alarming, Beijing is leveraging the United Nations itself to undermine the standards set out in the UDHR. 

In recent years, China has been able to mute criticism, as well as find champions for its rights abuses among UN member states. 

This has been partly achieved through an exchange of loans and grants for silence and support, as well as threats and intimidation.
Furthermore, China has targeted individual human rights defenders. 

In 2017, China tried to prevent me from delivering my statement at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, and at the 2019 Forum, it attempted to do the same to the President of the World Uyghur Congress Dolkun Isa. 

In 2013, China detained Cao Shunli, who was on her way to attend China’s Universal Periodic Review in 2013. 

She was charged with illegal assembly, picking quarrels and provoking trouble and died in detention in 2014. 

Remember, this is a state the UN Secretary-General has called “a pillar of international cooperation and multilateralism.”
Among the enablers of Xi Jinping’s repression are states with disreputable records attracted to a possible exemption from universal standards that ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ affords. 

And again, if we could freely ask the populations who reside in these states how they feel about such a concept, there would be few advocates. 

Therefore, on Human Rights Day, we have a responsibility to defend those who defend universal values and be clear ‘never again’ has meaning. 

There is injustice everywhere and we must fight it. 

Uyghurs are among them, for example, the imprisoned Ilham Tohti, and in exile Rebiya Kadeer, Rushan Abbas, and Gulchehra Hoja, whose families have been detained and disappeared in East Turkestan because of their advocacy. 

The second ‘South-South Human Rights Forum’ is opening in Shanghai for this year’s Human Rights Day. 

The dangerous fiction of the ‘Beijing Declaration’ that there are exceptions to the universality of rights should be firmly resisted.

China's human rights record to be examined in UN review

Treatment of minorities, detentions and suppression of freedoms to be scrutinised
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

A protest against the Chinese government’s detention of Muslim minorities in September in India. 

China’s human rights record will be examined on Tuesday at a UN event expected to focus on Beijing’s treatment of ethnic minorities, detention of activists and suppression of religious and civil freedoms.
The process, known as a universal periodic review (UPR), takes place every five years for each UN member state. 

The country under review is meant to demonstrate how it has followed previous recommendations as well as answer questions from states, NGOs and others.
Advance questions from member states have focused on China’s treatment of ethnic minorities in East Turkestan, where an estimated 1 million ethnic Uighurs and others are detained in a network of internment camps.
Others raised questions about press freedoms in Hong Kong, where a journalist with the Financial Times was in effect expelled; the detention of Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai; and the detention of human rights defenders such as the lawyer Wang Quanzhang, the Uighur activist Ilham Tohti, and the dissident Huang Qi, who is believed to be suffering from chronic kidney disease, an accumulation of fluid in the brain, and heart disease.
On Monday, a group of 14 NGOs called on China to release Huang on the basis that there was an immediate threat to his life. 

According to the statement, authorities have repeatedly rejected applications for release on medical bail, allowing his health to deteriorate.
Critics say this year’s review highlights how China’s human rights record has deteriorated under the leadership of Xi Jinping. 

“What is most telling is that we are asking the same questions as we head into China’s third review. That some of the same issues are still coming up is a powerful statement of how little progress China has made,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.
Rights activists say China has sought to suppress the voices of dissidents at events on the global stage such as this. 

Fewer Chinese activists and NGOs are participating in the review process than in years past, in what some call the “Cao Shunli effect”, after the activist who was detained for participating in China’s UPR in 2009 and 2013. 

Cao died in a military hospital in 2014 after being denied treatment.
“All UN member states have an equal opportunity to press China on its egregious human rights record, and they shouldn’t waste it,” said John Fisher, the Geneva director at Human Rights Watch.
“Chinese activists have been imprisoned, tortured, and fatally mistreated for the chance to challenge Beijing over its human rights record.”

Criminal Nation

Persecuted to the End: China, Let Liu Xiaobo Leave

By Jackie Sheehan

'The struggle for proper protection of citizens’ rights in China will shortly have to go on without Liu Xiaobo, one of its most thoughtful, decent, and eloquent proponents.'

The 11-year sentence imposed on Liu Xiaobo in December 2009 dismayed anyone who had followed his career as a writer and activist over the previous 20 years, not only because it was completely unjustified for a man who had done nothing more than peacefully express his views, but also because its length meant that there was a real risk, given prevailing prison conditions in China, that Liu would not survive it.
In 2010 when Liu received the Nobel Peace Prize, I wrote that the Chinese government would be very anxious that he not die in prison, and that his international fame would be some protection against the worst abuses of his rights.
Seven years on, I doubt both those conclusions, given the utterly cynical way in which the government has waited until Liu is close to death from liver cancer and reportedly beyond treatment before transferring him from prison to the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang.
That his wife, the artist Liu Xia, can now be with him every day is some small mercy for both of them.
Liu Xia has been through her own personal hell of surveillance and isolation since her husband won the Nobel Peace Prize, being confined to her apartment in Beijing and only allowed out under guard. Friends and supporters who managed to get a glimpse of her or speak to her feared for her mental health as years of this relentless persecution took their toll.
That Liu and his family have reportedly said they are satisfied with the treatment he is now receiving means nothing at all; as long as they are still on Chinese soil, they cannot be assumed to be able to speak freely. 
Even if there is nothing to offer him but palliative care at this stage, only outside China can Liu and those closest to him at least say what they really feel about China and about the ordeal which they have all undergone while he has been in prison. 
Even if Liu was able to write while in prison, it’s very unlikely that he was allowed to bring any papers out with him; Democracy Wall veteran and China Democracy Party founder Qin Yongmin had every scrap of paper, even his copy of his own notice of sentence, confiscated from him when he was released from jail in 2010.
If we are to hear anything more from Liu Xiaobo that we can trust as his authentic testimony, it will have to come from outside China.
Liu’s writings and activism have been part of a broad and long-running campaign in the PRC, taken up in various ways by different generations, to bring the ruling party under the control of the law and establish legal guarantees for the rights which all Chinese citizens have had on paper, in the Constitution, since the early 1950s.
Without such checks and balances, how an individual is treated in China has depended on who they are, and “rights” have actually been privileges, to be granted or withheld at the whim of the leadership.
There could be no better illustration of this than the fact that Bo Xilai, only five years into his prison sentence for corruption and abuse of power on an epic scale, was revealed to be suffering from liver cancer in the same week that Liu Xiaobo’s condition became known. 
Bo’s cancer has been detected at an early stage and should be treatable, and even though the facilities at Qincheng No.1 Prison have been described by a Chinese academic as “excellent”, he has reportedly been moved to a hospital near Dalian.
And clearly, prisoners should be entitled to good-quality medical care and parole in the case of serious illness, regardless of what they have done.
This is not an argument that Bo’s Chongqing torture spree in the service of his self-enriching crackdown on alleged organized crime should disqualify him from enjoying a prisoner’s basic rights. The point is that, because of his former CCP status, Bo has been given the consideration due to a prisoner found to be seriously ill, while Liu Xiaobo has only been admitted to a proper hospital when his cancer was already beyond treatment.
The withholding of medical parole and proper treatment from Liu Xiaobo is part of a pattern in recent years of targeting activists and lawyers in this way. 
In the case of Cao Shunli, she was managing several health problems when detained in September 2013 well enough to be planning to travel abroad to participate in a UN human rights review, but only five months later died after having medicines confiscated from her and being denied treatment in detention. 
The detention centre where she was held asked her family to apply for medical parole for her, clearly fearing that she would otherwise die in detention.
Guangdong anti-torture activist Huang Yan has reported receiving inadequate medical care for her ovarian cancer and diabetes while in prison, and the cancer had reportedly spread to other sites by April 2016. 
Environmental activist Peng Ming foreshadowed his own sudden death in prison with a warning to his family to suspect foul play if he met with an “accident”.
Huang was one of six cases of seriously ill prisoners highlighted by China Human Rights Defenders in an appeal to the UN in May 2016, a month before a CCP government White Paper on “New Progress in the Judicial Protection of Human Rights in China” was released, which included the following statement on detainees’ rights: “Prisons and detention houses should improve medical services for detainees, create medical records for them, staff them with stationed doctors, who make rounds of the cells every day, and transfer those who need to be treated in hospitals outside in a timely manner… We should improve medical facilities, strengthen disease prevention and control, provide timely treatment to sick detainees, and guarantee their rights to life and health in accordance with the law.”
But this was already the law in China, and routinely disregarded when it came to activist prisoners.
So the struggle for proper protection of citizens’ rights in China will shortly have to go on without Liu Xiaobo, one of its most thoughtful, decent, and eloquent proponents.
Perhaps his example can inspire his successors to try to do so without giving in to rancor, hatred, or desire for vengeance, but always with hope that there is nothing about China’s situation which makes citizens’ rights, social justice and freedom an impossible dream.

Sina Delenda Est

China’s Ignoble Treatment of a Nobel Laureate
By CHEN GUANGCHENG

Protesters holding portraits of Liu Xiaobo at a demonstration in Hong Kong on Saturday.

One of my countrymen, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been imprisoned for eight years for the crime of drafting Charter 08, a political manifesto calling for democracy in China.
Now, the 61-year-old intellectual and literary critic has liver cancer — and the Chinese authorities are refusing to allow him to travel to the United States for medical treatment. 

If Mr. Liu’s incarceration for “inciting subversion of state power” was appalling, the way China has handled Mr. Liu’s illness should give pause to any government or business seeking to form closer ties with Beijing.
No lawyer or independent medical professional has been allowed to see Mr. Liu since his diagnosis. This is particularly troubling given that Reuters recently reported that Mr. Liu’s “time is limited” because of a fluid buildup around his stomach. 

Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, herself under house arrest, was allowed to see her husband in the hospital, but only under the close watch of guards. 

In the meantime, the Chinese authorities released a preposterous video in which a figure purported to be Mr. Liu exercises and undergoes “routine medical exams.”
But Mr. Liu’s treatment is anything but routine, as indicated by his release from prison on medical parole and the Chinese state’s condemnations of outside meddling — a sign the authorities are worried. 

Clearly, Beijing is concerned about what a tragic end for this famous dissident could mean for its international reputation.
All of this calls to mind the recent case of Otto Warmbier, the American citizen who, as a result of strong U.S. pressure, was released in June after being imprisoned last year by North Korea. 

When he went to the hermit kingdom as a tourist he was a healthy young man; when he returned home to Ohio he was in coma and died days later. 

North Korea continues to deny any wrongdoing.

China, like North Korea and other authoritarian regimes, has a penchant for brutality, lies and self-deception. 

I know this from personal experience.

In 2005, the Chinese authorities began what would turn out to be seven years of persecution of my family and me in retaliation for my work as an activist and lawyer, which focused on the corruption of the Communist Party, including its violent one-child policy. 

I was kidnapped, put in jails and detention centers and sentenced to over four years in prison on a bogus charge of “disrupting traffic order.”
In serving out my sentence in prison — where torture, forced labor and inhumane conditions were the norm — I was occasionally brought to the medical wing for sham exams performed by a staff made up of convicts who had a smattering of experience in medicine or biology. 

I was never seen by a properly trained doctor, despite grave illness and serious injuries inflicted on me by other inmates on order of the wardens. 

Before I was released, I was given a “medical exam” during which they injected me with drugs that caused me to be unable to speak properly for many days.
Once I returned home, my family and I were immediately placed under house arrest, during which we suffered from extreme deprivation, isolation, and beatings. 

If fleeing entered our minds, we were deterred by guards in our house and in our village tracking us 24 hours a day.
I was severely ill, and my wife often heard the guards chatting among themselves, saying they thought either I or my elderly mother would die soon. 

Meanwhile the authorities publicly claimed — accompanied by propaganda photos and videos — that I was well and free. 

Ultimately I escaped, crawling to a nearby village on my hands and knees — a task made more difficult given my blindness. 

I arrived, finally, at the United States embassy in Beijing in 2012. 

Now I live in freedom in America with my family.
My case and Mr. Liu’s are fairly well known in the West, but there are many attorneys and activists in China who have endured horrific suffering. 

Such political prisoners are routinely denied due process under the law and are forced to participate in show trials in which verdicts are predetermined by Communist Party insiders. 

Some don’t survive prison: Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, Cao Shunli, Li Wangyang and Peng Ming-Min are among those who have died behind bars. 

Families of the victims will likely never get clear answers, as their loved ones’ organs are immediately removed and bodies cremated before independent autopsies can be performed.
For a nation with no rule of law, one of the main levers for influencing the status quo is outspoken condemnation from foreign governments and the public. 

Authoritarian regimes fear public shame, which is why it is time to shame China’s Communist Party for its brutal treatment of Mr. Liu and other champions of liberty currently being held by Beijing.
The Trump administration had no qualms about condemning North Korea’s shameful treatment of Otto Warmbier. 

The White House should do the same for Liu Xiaobo by forcefully demanding his immediate release to the United States for medical treatment.
The document that sent Mr. Liu to prison, Charter 08, insists that “every person is born with inherent rights to dignity and freedom.” 

That sounds a lot like the Declaration of Independence we will be celebrating tomorrow. 

This Fourth of July, will we in America use our freedom to call for the liberation of others?

Political Murder

Nobel laureate's supporters call for inquiry into prison treatment.
http://www.aljazeera.com
Prison officials said Liu is being treated at a hospital in Shenyang city.
A growing chorus of Chinese human-rights lawyers and activists are calling for Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Liu Xiaobo's unconditional release after he was granted medical parole to undergo treatment for late-stage liver cancer.
The US also added its voice on Tuesday urging China to give Liu and his wife, Liu Xia, freedom to move and choose his own doctors.
A brief video has emerged of Liu Xia tearfully telling a friend that no treatment -- surgery, radiation or chemotherapy -- would work for her husband at this point.
"[They] cannot perform surgery, cannot perform radiotherapy, cannot perform chemotherapy," Liu Xia, who has been under effective house arrest since 2010, says in the video.
The news has shocked and angered supporters and human-rights campaigners, who questioned if the democracy advocate had received adequate care or whether the Chinese government had deliberately allowed him to wither in prison.
Liu was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power" after he helped write a petition known as "Charter 08" calling for sweeping political reforms.
China has criticised calls for Liu's release as "irresponsible" and interference in its internal affairs.
Hundreds of Chinese lawyers, activists and friends have signed a petition calling on authorities to give Liu "complete freedom" and allow his wife to "have contact with the outside world".
They also called on authorities to carry out a "thorough investigation" into the circumstances that led to the deterioration of his health.

'Deliberately sentenced'
Prison officials said Liu is being treated by "eight renowned Chinese oncologists" at a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang. 

Friends of the couple told AFP news agency that Liu Xia has been allowed to visit him there.
Wu'er Kaixi and Wang Dan, former student leaders at the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests who now live overseas, posted a joint statement on Twitter saying China had "deliberately sentenced him to death".
In Hong Kong, about 70 supporters of Liu took to the streets to demand his immediate release on Tuesday, chanting slogans denouncing the Chinese government as a "murderer".

Dozens protested in Hong Kong on Tuesday over Liu's treatment in prison.
Human rights campaigners also demanded to know whether Liu received any medical treatment while he was in jail and why he was not given parole earlier.
"It's very difficult to understand why his illness is only being treated at the last stage," said Amnesty International's Patrick Poon.
Human Rights Watch's Sophie Richardson, citing two other cases of critics who died in detention, said the government "needs to be held to account for permitting yet another peaceful critic to fall gravely ill while unjustly detained".
She said China had a history of allowing "peaceful critics to become gravely ill and die in detention".
Among them are Tibetan monk Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, who was 13 years into a life sentence for terrorism and separatism when he died in prison in July 2015.
Cao Shunli, a Chinese dissident, died in custody in March 2014 after being denied medical treatment for months.
Some said Liu's treatment heightened concerns over lesser-known activists still languishing in prison.
Liu's medical parole was not a humanitarian gesture, but rather a cynical attempt by authorities to avoid a backlash for allowing such a well-known rights defender to die behind bars.
Chen Guangcheng, a human-rights lawyer who fled to the US in 2012, said: "If Liu died in prison this would arouse the anger of the people and accelerate the demise of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]."

The Magnitsky Act : Trump has the power to fight China on human rights. Will he use it?

President Trump inherits law originally aimed at Russia that allows him to sanction any official involved in violations – and China activists have put forward a list.

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

The human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng was one of the Chinese government’s high-profile targets. 

As Donald Trump enters the White House, human rights campaigners around the world fear his administration will drop support for global struggles for democracy and freedom. 

But his administration is armed with a new law unprecedented in US history: the ability to sanction any individual involved in human rights abuses.
Now a newly formed NGO is hoping to push the US to sanction a slew of Chinese names, focusing on prosecutors and police who handle cases of prominent human rights activists. 

Potential punishments including travel bans, freezing assets and seizing property.
“There is well documented evidence that Chinese officials routinely commit gross violations of human rights against dissidents and human rights defenders,” said Senator Benjamin Cardin, the sponsor of the law. 

“Those officials responsible for such violations should be investigated under the act.”
The Magnitsky Act was first passed in 2012 but until December 2016 it only applied to Russia. 

It is named after the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was accused officials of stealing state funds and subsequently died in custody.
It was used this month to blacklist five Russian officials including Alexander Bastrykin, the powerful head of Russia’s investigative committee who reports directly to Vladimir Putin.
With its global expansion in December a group of veteran China activists established the China Human Rights Accountability Center with the singular goal of collecting evidence to mount cases under the Magnitsky Act.
“China’s human rights record is the worst in the world, surely in terms of scale, and this law sends a strong and clear message to Chinese officials,” said Teng Biao, one of the founders and a visiting fellow at New York University. 

“Being sanctioned would be a huge embarrassment and a confirmation of the suffering inflicted by so many.”
While convincing the US government to publicly sanction Chinese officials may be an uphill battle, the law specifically says the president will consider “information obtained by … nongovernmental organisations”.
The state department will submit a report to Congress sometime in April with a list of names. 

Even if the activists fail in having all of them sanctioned, they plan to put the detailed evidence on their website for the public to see.
“The name of the game is to scare, shame and embarrass officials who violate human rights,” said Yaxue Cao, another founder and editor of the human rights website ChinaChange.org.
The group is preparing to submit evidence for at least three names so far, including Jia Lianchun, a judge who presided over the trials of three prominent human rights activists including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. 

Liu was jailed for 11 years.
The others are Xia Baolong, who led a campaign against Christian groups as the Communist party boss of Zhejiang province; and Li Qun, who put the blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng under house arrest. 

Chen is also a founding member of the accountability centre.
Other potential targets for the NGO are the police and prosecutors who handled the case of Cao Shunli, a rights lawyer who died in 2014 – like Magnitsky, in police custody. 

The centre also plans to investigate the officials who prosecuted Ilham Tohti, an economics professor and member of the Uighur minority who was jailed for life and later given the prestigious Martin Ennals award.
“In the past the US criticised and we expressed our values but we really haven’t had any very effective tools to influence China,” said Susan Shirk, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state. “It was a very frustrating situation to feel that we don’t have the tools to really have much impact in these types of cases.”
Shirk, who is now the chair of the 21st Century China Centre at the University of California San Diego, pointed to US citizens held in China and often denied due process as a group that could benefit from the Magnitsky Act.
One prominent case is that of Sandy Phan-Gillis, an American who was charged with spying after being held for over a year and is believed to have been tortured, with the UN saying her detention is a violation of international law.
Many human rights activists in China and around the world are worried that Trump’s presidency will mean less focus on human rights but members of Congress have made clear it is still a foreign policy priority.
“We look forward to working with the new administration to make sure that the law is carried out in full, and without fear or favour,” Cardin said.
“We expect that the administration will take the necessary actions to implement the law and we in Congress will do our job of oversight to make sure that that is the case.”
Members of the centre say they hope professional diplomats will still push these causes, with Cao saying: “Trump can’t control everyone and there are many in the state department passionate about human rights.
“Trump has said he wants to restart, rethink and remap China-US relations, and he will put human rights into play because that’s something he can use in negotiations.
“Considering how bad China’s human rights record is, if no Chinese officials are on the list then that will stink for Trump’s administration.”
While most of the NGO’s founding members are based in the US, Hu Jia, having been denied a passport for years, remains in Beijing and could bear the brunt of any government reprisals.
“This is very dangerous work, but ever since I started doing human rights work I was more concerned for my family’s wellbeing than my own,” Hu said. 

“I’m the man of action on the ground and I hope I can help bring this law to life, give it power and have it make an impact.”
Police have been stationed outside Hu’s home for more than a decade beginning in 2004, even keeping watch over his wife and daughter while he was in prison for three and a half years. 

But Hu feels more at ease that only he will bear the brunt of any government reprisal now that his ex-wife and daughter are living in Hong Kong.
Hu said Australia, Canada and European countries should follow America’s lead and enact similar legislation, grasping a unique opportunity to make an impact.
“On the surface all these officials are very patriotic but in reality they’ve all stashed their money in the US,” Hu said.