China accused over 'enforced disappearance' of Liu Xiaobo's widow

Liu Xia not seen since sea burial of late Nobel peace prize winner in July

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Liu Xia (centre, holding a portrait of Liu Xiaobo) has not been seen since Beijing released photos of her at her husband’s funeral. 

Chinese authorities are guilty of the Kafkaesque enforced disappearance of Liu Xia, the wife of late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, the couple’s US lawyer has claimed.
Jared Genser, a Washington-based human rights attorney who has represented them since 2010, made the claim in a formal complaint submitted to the United Nations on Wednesday.

A plainclothes agent outside the Beijing apartment of Liu Xia, the wife of the late dissident Liu Xiaobo. 

Almost three weeks after the Chinese dissident became the first Nobel peace prize winner to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky – who died in 1938 after years in Nazi concentration camps – his widow’s precise whereabouts are a mystery.
Friends say the 56-year-old poet was initially forced to travel to southwest China with security agents, but may now have returned to the capital, where she has lived under virtual house arrest since her husband won the Nobel peace prize in December 2010.
Foreign journalists who have attempted to visit the couple’s Beijing flat have faced harassment and physical violence while Chinese officials have refused to answer questions on the subject.
Genser said Beijing’s continued persecution of his client took Communist party repression to an “incredibly disturbing new low” and constituted an enforced disappearance.
In his petition to the UN’s working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances, requesting “urgent intervention”, he wrote: “According to international law, an enforced disappearance involves (1) deprivation of liberty against the will of the person; (2) involvement of government officials; and (3) refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.”
Genser told the Guardian: “It is crystal clear to me that what has happened to Liu Xia falls squarely and unequivocally within this definition.”
Liu Xia was last seen on 15 July when authorities released photographs showing her attending her husband’s controversial sea burial, which supporters suspect was devised to deny them a place to remember the democracy icon and his ideas.
“There has been no information as to where she is, who is detaining her or when she might reappear. [But] it is clear to me … that the Chinese government has her,” said Genser. 

“She continues to suffer enormously … I actually don’t think Kafka could have imagined a scenario as terrible as hers.”
Genser said he expected that, having received his complaint, the UN body would now ask Beijing to respond to claims that Chinese security forces were behind Liu Xia’s disappearance. 

He hoped the move would force Beijing to “reappear” Liu Xia, who has never been charged with any crime, and allow her to leave China. 

The United States, Germany and Britain are among the governments that have called for her release.
Genser also voiced support for a congressional push to rename the street on which China’s US embassy is located, in homage to the late democracy icon. 

According to the Washington Post, Chinese leaders are livid at the campaign and have been lobbying the Trump administration to veto the proposal. 

China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, recently warned the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, that changing the street’s name from International Place to Liu Xiaobo Plaza would “seriously affect Chinese cooperation on major issues”.

Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo

Genser called for similar moves in European capitals that might see Rue de Washington in Paris become the Rue de Liu Xiaobo and London’s Portland Place renamed Liu Xiaobo Place. 

“It is clear that the Chinese government would like to erase the memory of Liu Xiaobo from the world’s imagination. The idea … that every piece of mail that would go to a Chinese embassy in Washington, London and Paris would be [stamped with his name] would really be anathema to the Chinese government.”
Genser said that while his focus was freeing Liu Xia, the campaign was an effective way to pressure Beijing. 

“To me this is a means to an end. I’m not committed to having the street renamed.
“But if the government won’t relent … they are leaving advocates with really no option other than to go down this road.”
China’s foreign ministry, the only government body that regularly interacts with journalists, has repeatedly ignored questions about Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo, who was serving an 11-year jail term for subversion when he was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer in May.
Questions about their plight have been purged from official transcripts of its press conferences. 

“I do not know the information you mentioned and is not a diplomatic question,” foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a reporter from Sky News who inquired about Liu Xia’s whereabouts last week. 

“Next question.”

The Quiet Death of 'Liu Xiaobo Plaza'

Just as China has one party, the United States has one party, when it comes to policy toward China: Whatever you do, do not annoy the CCP.
By Jay Nordlinger

Readers of National Review are well aware of “Liu Xiaobo Plaza.” 
We have editorialized in favor of it, and I have written about it from time to time. 
A bill has passed the Senate. 
It has apparently been killed by the House — the Republican House. 
Worse, it has been killed in silence, without explanation. 
Let me back up. 
Liu Xiaobo is a Chinese intellectual, democracy activist, and political prisoner. He has been imprisoned since 2008. Two years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in absentia, of course). 
I wrote about this here. 
Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest for all this time: a brutal form of house arrest. She has no access to the outside world. No television or Internet. 
Guards make sure she is locked in, day and night. 
According to reports, she is in bad physical and mental shape. 
In the mid-1980s, Congress, with President Reagan, did something symbolic: They renamed the area outside the Soviet embassy in Washington “Andrei Sakharov Plaza” — in honor of the great Russian scientist and dissident (who was also a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize). 
Taking a page from the anti-Communists and freedom champions of that era, Senator Ted Cruz and others proposed “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” — an area outside the Chinese embassy named after one of the dictatorship’s most prominent political prisoners, and one of the greatest men in all of China. 
The Senate passed the bill, by unanimous consent, in February. 
Since then, it has gone to the House — to the committee chaired by Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), as I understand it. 
He has refused to move on the bill. 
The speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, has refused to move as well. 
Chaffetz, I don’t know much about. It seems to me he had about 17 positions on Donald Trump during the recent campaign. 
Ryan, I do know something about: and he has long been a freedom champion. 
A Reaganite. An old-style Republican. 
In the vice-presidential debate four years ago, he ripped Joe Biden six ways to Sunday on this question of freedom. 
The Obama administration had betrayed our values, he said. 
This was particularly true in Iran, whose Green Revolution was essentially ignored by Obama, Biden & Co. 
Jared Genser is a well-known human-rights lawyer. 
He represents both Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia (pro bono). About two weeks ago, he had an article in the Wall Street Journal, urging Ryan to act. 
There has been no sign of action. 
Why? 
To my knowledge, neither Ryan nor Jason Chaffetz nor anybody else has offered a word of explanation. 
That is their right, I suppose. 
Even public officials can keep mum, if they want. 
But I think they owe the public an answer. 
I think the public — or somebody — should demand an answer. 
President Obama would no doubt veto a Liu bill. 
So? 
Is the House GOP’s view the same as Obama’s? 
So far as I know, the 2009 Nobel peace laureate (Obama) has never lifted a finger for the 2010 Nobel peace laureate (Liu). 
For decades now, I have said that, just as China has one party, the United States has one party, when it comes to policy toward China: Whatever you do, do not annoy the CCP. 
There are some honorable exceptions to this rule — George W. Bush appeared in public with the Dalai Lama — but not enough. 
My guess is, Republican donors don’t like the idea of “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” because they want commercial relations with China. 
They fear that honoring a dissident will endanger commercial relations. 
I doubt this is so. 
The Free World has more leverage than it knows. 
I should say, too, that I’m all for commercial relations. 
In fact, I’m more for them than are most. 
But there are other considerations in life, such as standing up to a one-party dictatorship with a gulag. 
Standing up for the values and principles that constitute our heritage — that constitute our very reason for being. 
Evidently, “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” is dead in this session of Congress — killed by the House Republicans. 
If it is to come to pass, it must be revived in a future session: starting from square one. 
I hope that Speaker Ryan will have a change of mind. 
And that President Trump will sign the bill. 
Human rights are not all of foreign policy, heaven knows. But they are a component. 
And Americans are a peculiar nation, a peculiar people — not like all the others. 
Freedom has few enough friends as it is. 
If it loses us, it barely stands a chance.