Chinazism: Hong Kong becomes a police state

The Hong Kong government is using its police force as a tool to abuse the public power and to torture the people

Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON, United States – Hong Kong is a police state where officers – once dubbed "Asia's finest" – are conducting abuses in the service of the city's pro-Beijing leadership, prominent voices in the global financial hub's weeks-long protest movement told AFP Saturday, September 21.
The comments came as riot police and demonstrators in Hong Kong fought brief skirmishes Saturday near the Chinese border.
They were the latest clashes during more than 3 months of demonstrations to protest stuttering freedoms in the semi-autonomous territory.
"Within these 3-and-a-half months, we have seen the police in Hong Kong getting totally out of control," activist and pop star Denise Ho said in an interview with AFP.
"Hong Kong has become a police state where the government is hiding behind the police force and refusing to find solutions to the present crisis," she added.
Well-known figures in the leaderless protest movement have visited the United States, Germany, Taiwan, and Australia to raise awareness.
"Our police system has been corrupted into a personal tool for Carrie Lam to maintain her power and to abuse the public power to torture the people, to silence the people," another activist, Brian Leung, said in the AFP interview.
He was referring to the leader of the former British colony, who was not directly elected but appointed by an overwhelmingly Beijing-friendly committee.
On Friday, September 20, Amnesty International accused Hong Kong police of using excessive force.
"In an apparent thirst for retaliation, Hong Kong's security forces have engaged in a disturbing pattern of reckless and unlawful tactics against people during the protests," said Nicholas Bequelin, the watchdog's East Asia Director.
"This has included arbitrary arrests and retaliatory violence against arrested persons in custody, some of which has amounted to torture," he added.
Leung told AFP, "There are countless incidents of such brutality and the worst of the situation is the police has systematically concealed their identity, are not showing their faces... which makes accountability impossible."
He alleged that some injured protesters do not go to the hospital because they fear that could lead to police getting information about them.
"So we do not know the exact scale and numbers of those injuries and we are sure that the police, if they continue such brutality, it will be only a matter of time before some citizen might suffer from fatal injuries," Leung added.
Millions took to Hong Kong's streets beginning in June, but small groups of hardcore protesters have set fires, stormed the city's legislature, and hurled rocks and petrol bombs at officers, who have fired back with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Joshua Wong, another activist, said he is one of 200 among the 1,500 arrested to face prosecution.
A 12-year-old child was also detained, and "even [a] first aider, doctors, or [a] nurse in the protest zone, they will still be arrested by riot police without any legitimate reason," he said.
"Hong Kong [has] transformed from a modern global city to a police state with police violence," Wong told AFP.
Among their demands, activists want an independent probe of police brutality.
The protests began against a now-scrapped plan to allow extraditions to the authoritarian Chinese mainland, but grew into a wider campaign for democracy, fuelled by animosity towards the police.
Under a deal that outlined Hong Kong's return to China from British colonial rule in 1997, Hong Kong enjoys liberties and rights not seen on the mainland, but freedoms are being eroded by Beijing.

Chinazism

ARBITRARY ARRESTS, BRUTAL BEATINGS AND TORTURE IN HONG KONG POLICE DETENTIONS REVEALED

Amnesty International

A new Amnesty International field investigation has documented an alarming pattern of the Hong Kong Police Force deploying reckless and indiscriminate tactics, including while arresting people at protests, as well as exclusive evidence of torture and other ill-treatment in detention.
After interviewing nearly two dozen arrested persons and gathering corroborating evidence and testimonies from lawyers, health workers and others, the organization is demanding a prompt and independent investigation into the violations, which appear to have escalated in severity since the mass protests began in June.
“The Hong Kong police’s heavy-handed crowd-control response on the streets has been livestreamed for the world to see. Much less visible is the plethora of police abuses against protesters that take place out of sight,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia Director at Amnesty International.
“The evidence leaves little room for doubt – in an apparent thirst for retaliation, Hong Kong’s security forces have engaged in a disturbing pattern of reckless and unlawful tactics against people during the protests. This has included arbitrary arrests and retaliatory violence against arrested persons in custody, some of which has amounted to torture.”
More than 1,300 people have been arrested in the context of the mass protests that started over proposed legislative amendments that would have allowed for extradition to mainland China. 

While the vast majority of protesters have been peaceful, there has been violence, which appears to be escalating alongside excessive use of force by the police. 

Most people who spoke to Amnesty International requested anonymity, citing fears of reprisals from the authorities amid a climate of impunity.
Interviews of arrested persons and lawyers by Amnesty International show that police violence most commonly occurred before and during arrest. 

In several cases, detained protesters have also been severely beaten in custody and suffered other ill-treatment amounting to torture. 

In multiple instances, the abuse appears to have been meted out as “punishment” for talking back or appearing uncooperative.
A man detained at a police station following his arrest at a protest in the New Territories in August told Amnesty International that after he refused to answer a police intake question, several officers took him to another room. 

There, they beat him severely and threatened to break his hands if he tried to protect himself.
“I felt my legs hit with something really hard. Then one [officer] flipped me over and put his knees on my chest. I felt the pain in my bones and couldn’t breathe. I tried to shout but I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t talk,” he said.

As the man was pinned to the ground, a police officer forced open the man’s eye and shined a laser pen into it, asking, “Don’t you like to point this at people?” 

This was an apparent reprisal for some protesters’ use of laser pens amid the protests. 

The man was later hospitalized for several days with a bone fracture and internal bleeding.
Amnesty International interviewed a different man who was arrested on another day in August in Sham Shui Po. 

The arresting officer repeatedly asked him to unlock his phone for inspection; angry at the refusals, the officer threatened to electrocute the man’s genitals. 

The man told Amnesty International he was “scared” the officer might follow through, “as the times are so crazy, I suppose anything is possible.”
While detained in a police station common room, the same man witnessed police officers force a boy to shine a laser pen into his own eye for about 20 seconds. 

“It seems he used the laser pen to shine at the police station,” the man recalled. 

“They said, ‘If you like to point the pen at us so much, why don’t you do it to yourself?’”
Amnesty International also documented a clear pattern of police officers using unnecessary and excessive force during arrests of protesters, with anti-riot police and a Special Tactical Squad (STS), commonly known as “raptors”, responsible for the worst violence. 

Almost every arrested person interviewed described being beaten with batons and fists during their arrest, even when they posed no resistance.
A young woman arrested at a protest in Sheung Wan in July was one of many protesters who described being clubbed from behind with a police baton as she was running away from a police charge; she was knocked to the ground and police officers continued to beat her after her hands were zip-tied.
Similarly, a man arrested at a protest in Tsim Sha Tsui in August described retreating and then running as police charged at the assembled protesters. 

He told Amnesty International that “raptors” caught up to him and hit him from behind with their batons on his neck and shoulder. 

He said: “Immediately I was beaten to the ground. Three of them got on me and pressed my face hard to the ground. A second later, they kicked my face … The same three STS kept putting pressure on my body. I started to have difficulty breathing, and I felt severe pain in my left ribcage … They said to me, ‘Just shut up, stop making noise.’”
According to medical records, he was hospitalized for two days and treated for a fractured rib and other injuries. 

In more than 85% of cases investigated by Amnesty International (18 out of 21), the arrested person was hospitalized as a result of their beating, with three of them spending at least five days in a hospital.
“Time and again, police officers meted out violence prior to and during arrests, even when the individual had been restrained or detained. The use of force was therefore clearly excessive, violating international human rights law,” said Nicholas Bequelin.
Amnesty International also documented multiple instances of arbitrary and unlawful arrests, as well as numerous cases where police denied or delayed access to lawyers and medical care to detainees. 

Providing timely access to lawyers, family members and medical professionals for persons in custody is an important safeguard against torture and other ill-treatment.
The findings come after a group of UN experts expressed alarm about the Hong Kong police’s pattern of attacks on and arrests of protesters.
“Given the pervasiveness of the abuses we found, it is clear that the Hong Kong Police Force is no longer in a position to investigate itself and remedy the widespread unlawful suppression of protesters. Amnesty International is urgently calling for an independent, impartial investigation aimed at delivering prosecutions, justice and reparation, as there is little trust in existing internal mechanisms such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC),” said Nicholas Bequelin.

Chinese Dissidents Feel Heat of Beijing’s Wrath. Even in Canada.

Sheng Xue thought she would be safe in Toronto. Then she began speaking out against the Chinese government and became the victim of a lurid smear campaign.
By Catherine Porter

Sheng Xue has been the victim of a relentless smear campaign that has all the markings of a coordinated attack by the Chinese Communist Party.

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario — Search for Sheng Xue on Google in English and you will find the story of an award-winning writer who left China for Canada after the Tiananmen Square uprising and became one of the world’s leading advocates for Chinese democracy.
But that same search in Chinese comes up with a very different portrait: Sheng Xue is a fraud, a thief, a traitor and a serial philanderer.
Want proof?
It offers up salacious photos, like one seeming to show her kissing a man who is not her husband.
As China extends its influence around the globe, it has mastered the art of soft power, establishing Confucius Institutes on Western college campuses and funding ports and power plants in developing countries.
But building up is only one prong of the Chinese strategy.
The other is knocking down.
And few know this better than Sheng Xue.
For more than six years, the Chinese-Canadian activist has been the victim of a relentless campaign to discredit her by blog, Listserv, e-book and social media, which bears the markings of a coordinated attack by the Chinese Communist Party.
“This is a textbook destabilization of the exile movement,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Asia.
“Since the early 1990s,” Mr. Bequelin said, “China has understood the best way to neutralize this group and prevent them from essentially getting organized is to ensure they have no undisputed figurehead.”
Sheng Xue is the pen name for 57-year-old Zang Xihong.
The attacks have left her name — and health — in tatters.
“I escaped Tiananmen Square in China,” she said one winter day sitting in the living room of her suburban bungalow outside Toronto.
“I thought I’d have a safe, happy life in Canada.”
But the Communist Party, she said, “was already here.”
The smears cannot be definitively linked to the Chinese government, experts say.
However in Canada, security experts have warned for years about the growing influence of Beijing not only on Chinese expatriates but on the Canadian government itself. 
In 2010, the head of Canada’s intelligence service shocked the country by declaring that the Chinese Communist Party had agents of influence in local governments.
And in 2017, a confidential report prepared by the Canadian branch of Amnesty International alerted the authorities to the harassment of Chinese-Canadian activists, the scale of which appeared “consistent with a coordinated, Chinese state-sponsored campaign.”
The dissident who seemed to be getting the worst of it: Sheng Xue.
“I think she’s a victim,” said Andy Ellis, the former assistant director of operations for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
“I strongly do. The Chinese government is trying to sully her reputation to advance their own interests.”
The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa declined to comment.

Rise to prominence. Flood of hate.
Sheng Xue, whose pen name is Mandarin for “abundant snow,” arrived in Canada in August 1989 on a visa to study journalism.
But while she had left China, she could not leave China behind.
Haunted by the sight of soldiers shooting into a crowd close to her family’s apartment during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June of that year, Sheng Xue abandoned her study plans and threw herself into the burgeoning Chinese democracy movement in Toronto.
She helped form a local branch of the Federation for a Democratic China, which at its height had 3,000 members in 25 countries.
Despite having forgone a degree, Sheng Xue broke into journalism and fashioned a successful career as a writer.
But she was best known for her activism — leading protests, lobbying governments and helping fellow activists with their asylum cases.
In 2012, Canada’s immigration minister gave her a medal for “extraordinary contributions to the country.”
A month later, she was elected president of the federation.
The first conference she hosted as the group’s president should have been a moment of glory. Hundreds came from across the globe.

Sheng Xue at a rally last year for political prisoners in front of the Chinese Consulate in Toronto.

The Chinese Consulate in Toronto.

Sheng Xue and her husband, Xin Dong, visiting the graveyard where her parents are buried in Mississauga, Ontario.

The moment she remembers best, however, is stepping off the stage and finding herself surrounded by colleagues holding cellphones.
They were showing her emails they had just received, with various photos of her half-naked.
Except they were obvious fakes.
In one photo, Sheng Xue’s face was pasted onto another woman’s body.
Another email included a supposed love letter from her to an activist in Australia, so crass, it seemed a parody.
The sender appeared to be yet another activist, Chin Jin, but he said the email was a fake.
There were sex-wanted ads posted in Sheng Xue’s name.
Lurid stories about her sex life.
Nude photos were published on a new Twitter account, of higher quality than the first ones, and harder to dismiss out of hand.
Some seemed to capture her kissing the Australian activist, Xiaogang Zhang, although both say they are fakes.
The timing seemed beyond coincidence.
“There has been a pattern,” said Jie Chen, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Western Australia who studies the Chinese democracy movement.
Pointing a finger at the Chinese Communist Party, he said, “Whoever is doing well, whoever seems to be effective in damaging the reputation of the C.C.P., all of a sudden they will get attacked very systematically.”

‘I am the real Liu Shaofu’
The attacks appear to exploit tensions within the dissident movement, where Sheng Xue is a polarizing figure.
“People who love her, really love her,” said Michael Stainton, the retired president of the Taiwanese Human Rights Association of Canada.
“People who despise her, really despise her.”
Many of her attackers are former friends and colleagues. But they say their identities were stolen.
Zhu Rui, a Chinese-Canadian author, began questioning Sheng Xue back in 2010, after the two traveled together to Dharamsala, India.
Since then, Ms. Zhu has penned many critical blog posts and assembled two e-books about Sheng Xue, accusing her of lying, personally profiting off refugee applicants and events, and being a fake witness to the Tiananmen Square massacre, among other things.
But in 2011, Ms. Zhu said, someone hacked into her computer, stole an unpublished essay about Sheng Xue and sent it to a dissident group posing as her.
Similarly, Liu Shaofu, an elder of the democracy movement, said an impostor opened a Twitter account with his name and photo to post criticism of Sheng Xue, including one fake nude photo.
Mr. Liu had collaborated with Sheng Xue for years, even living in her basement, but they had a public falling out in 2013.
“I am the real Liu Shaofu,” he wrote in his first tweet after setting up a different account in June 2014.
“Don’t you feel ashamed you sent out so many tweets in my name?”

Sheng Xue at a hospital for a CT scan. She says that stress related to ongoing online attacks has compromised her health.

A portrait of Xi Jinping was defaced at a rally for political prisoners at the Chinese Consulate in Toronto.

Toronto’s Chinatown district.

Perhaps Sheng Xue’s most vocal critic is Fei Liangyong, a former federation president living in Germany who has accused her of a raft of moral failings, including “sexual impropriety and general wickedness.”
“To not criticize her would run counter to my democratic ideas and bring shame on my lifelong struggle for democracy and constitutional government in China,” he said in an email.
Mr. Fei’s essays have been widely republished on anonymous anti-Sheng Xue blogs.
But he said he did not know who was behind them.
A Twitter account with his name and photo, which Mr. Fei said he did not create, posted links to one of the blogs.
Many fellow activists, even those who have themselves been targeted by the Chinese government, believe some of the accusations against Sheng Xue.
“The Chinese government tries all means to marginalize, to silence and detain Chinese activists, in China and outside,” said Teng Biao, a civil rights lawyer who escaped China in 2012 and now lives in New Jersey.
But, he added, “what happened to Sheng Xue might be a little complicated, because as far as I know, some claims are true.”
Taken together, a pattern emerges: Doubt is turned into distrust, and dislike into loathing.
“It’s called blowing on the hot coals,” said Mr. Bequelin of Amnesty International.

A movement splintered
Sheng Xue learned the Chinese government had her on its black list in 1996, when she tried to return to Beijing.
She was stopped at the airport, interrogated and sent back to Canada the next day.
Since then, it has become clear she remains a target, and at least three comrades in Canada report pressure from Chinese security services over their ties to her.
One, Yi Jun, said every time he returned to China, he was taken to tea by members of the Communist security bureau.
“They say Sheng Xue is very counterrevolutionary and a very bad person,” said Mr. Yi, the president of the federation’s Toronto branch.
Another dissident, Leon Liang, said his wife back in Shenzhen was visited regularly by the authorities and given a warning: “If I didn’t inform on Sheng Xue, they would take her job.”
The attacks on Sheng Xue have taken a toll not just on her but on the dissident movement itself.
The federation, which had already dwindled to about 100 members, split in two in 2017, with Mr. Fei forming a second group.
Sheng Xue has stepped down as president.
The fight was so public and ugly, it tarnished everyone.
One member in Germany distributed an “investigation” a year after the death of Sheng Xue’s mother, claiming that she had pimped out her young daughters, and that it was the source of Sheng Xue’s moral bankruptcy.
“I really lament the fact the organization founded by Tiananmen Square leaders and intellectuals has degenerated to such a miserable state,” said Mr. Chen, the University of Western Australia professor.
Few dissidents will fail to get the message, said Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former Canadian intelligence officer specializing in China: “If you participate and support these people, look what I can do to you. Your local government won’t be able to protect you.”

Sheng Xue lives in a bungalow in a suburb of Toronto. Many fellow dissidents stay there, renting rooms in the basement.

The walls of Sheng Xue’s living room are decorated with photos of her with influential people, including the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere.

Sheng Xue with friends and supporters during her birthday party.

Sheng Xue continues her activism, but her health has been declining.
She has met with doctors about heart palpitations and headaches.
She never found an effective defense against the campaign, which she dismisses in totality as lies.
Some of her supporters formed a “Friends of Sheng Xue” organization, declaring the attacks a “threat to Canada’s sovereignty and security.”
They got nowhere.
In its report, Amnesty International urged the Canadian government to fashion a “comprehensive approach to addressing this problem,” and suggested a complaint hotline.
That has not happened.
In 2016, a Chinese-Canadian human rights lawyer, Guo Guoting, volunteered himself as an arbiter between Sheng Xue and Mr. Fei.
He considers both friends.
Mr. Guo moved into Sheng Xue’s home for a month and began researching the attacks.
But his computer was hacked, he said, and “all the documents disappeared.”
He never published his report.

The Manchurian Apple

Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud users

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is launching a new social media campaign targeting Apple over its betrayal of millions of Chinese iCloud users by recklessly making their personal data vulnerable to the arbitrary scrutiny of the Chinese government.

Amnesty is urging Apple CEO Tim Cook not sell out iCloud users in China.
In a nod to Apple’s iconic ‘1984’ advert, the campaign takes an Orwellian theme with the line “All Apple users are equal but some are less equal than others”. 

It launches as the tech company’s chief executive, Tim Cook, touches down in Beijing to co-chair a Chinese business forum.
“Tim Cook is not being upfront with Apple’s Chinese users when insisting that their private data will always be secure. Apple’s pursuit of profits has left Chinese iCloud users facing huge new privacy risks,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia Director at Amnesty International.
“Apple’s influential ‘1984’ ad challenged a dystopian future but in 2018 the company is now helping to create one. Tim Cook preaches the importance of privacy but for Apple’s Chinese customers’ these commitments are meaningless. It is pure doublethink.”
“By handing over its China iCloud service to a local company without sufficient safeguards, the Chinese authorities now have unfettered access to all Apple’s Chinese customers’ iCloud data. Apple knows it, yet has not warned its customers in China of the risks.”

On 28 February, Apple transferred the operation of its iCloud service for Chinese users to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. 

The move affects any photos, documents, contacts, messages and other user data and content that Chinese users store on Apple’s cloud-based servers.
On 1 February, Amnesty International wrote to Apple raising our concerns about the changes and asked the company to provide further information. 

Apple has yet to respond to the request. 

Privacy threat
New Chinese legislation enacted in 2017 requires cloud services to be operated by Chinese companies, meaning companies like Apple must either lease server space inside China or establish joint ventures with Chinese partners.
Chinese domestic law gives the government unrestricted access to user data stored inside China without adequate protection for users’ rights to privacy, freedom of expression or other basic human rights.
As a result, Chinese internet users can face arrest and imprisonment for merely expressing, communicating or accessing information and ideas the authorities do not approve of.
Amnesty’s online campaign urges consumers to tell Tim Cook to reject double standards when it comes to privacy for Apple’s Chinese customers, whose personal data is now at risk of ending up in the hands of the government.

Think Different
Apple’s chief executive will be in Beijing on 24-26 March to co-chair the China Development Forum, which aims to foster relationships between the Chinese government and global business leaders. 

Apple reported record revenues of US$17.9 billion for Greater China in the last quarter.
“While Apple may claim it treats its customers equally, some are less equal than others. Profits should never threaten privacy. It’s time for Apple to Think Different when it comes to the privacy of its millions of Chinese customers,” said Nicholas Bequelin.
“Apple needs to be much more transparent about the risks to privacy posed by recent changes to the iCloud service in China.”

1984
Directed by Ridley Scott, Apple’s 1984 advert of the same year is considered to be one of the greatest TV commercials of all time. 

Scores of grey clad clones are fixated on a giant screen as Big Brother celebrates “Information Purification Directives”. 

An athletic woman in bright clothes storms past troops to take a sledge-hammer to the screen unleashing an explosion. 

A voice over says "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"

Tech Quisling

Amnesty International Is Accusing Apple of Betraying Chinese iCloud Users

By LAIGNEE BARRON

Amnesty International says Apple Inc is creating the Orwellian future it once envisioned by potentially opening up the data of Chinese iCloud users to Beijing’s scrutiny.
Texts, photos, emails, contacts and any other information stored on Apple’s cloud service in China could now be easily accessed by the government, Amnesty claims, warning of arrests or imprisonment as rights to privacy and free speech are infringed upon.
Apple famously positioned itself as a champion of free expression in its iconic “1984” advertisement.
According to an Amnesty blog post, to comply with new legislation in China, Apple, as of last month, began hosting Chinese users’ accounts on servers operated by a Chinese company, with the encryption keys managed by the local provider. 

The rights group says that previously, in order to view a Chinese account, Beijing would have had to go through the U.S. legal system. 

Now, communist officials will be able to go through China’s compliant courts.
“Apple’s pursuit of profits has left Chinese iCloud users facing huge new privacy risks,” Amnesty’s East Asia Director Nicholas Bequelin alleged in a statement. 

Apple reported record earnings of $17.9 billion in Greater China in the last quarter, up from US$16.2 billion in the same period a year ago.
According to some estimates, mainland China is the largest market of iPhone users.
“By handing over its China iCloud service to a local company without sufficient safeguards, the Chinese authorities now have unfettered access to all Apple’s Chinese customers’ iCloud data. Apple knows it, yet has not warned its customers in China of the risks,” Bequelin said.
The human rights group this week launched a social media campaign targeting Apple, just in time to coincide with Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook’s visit to Beijing.

The Butcher's Pope

• Vatican defends inviting Chinese ex-minister to organ trafficking talks
• Huang Jiefu’s inclusion at summit confers legitimacy on Beijing’s forced organ harvesting

By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome

Vatican officials have defended their decision to invite a Chinese former deputy health minister to a conference on organ trafficking despite concerns that China still relies on the organs of executed prisoners in its transplant programme.
Medical ethics experts and human rights activists have decried the move by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to invite Huang Jiefu to a two-day conference starting on Tuesday that aims to expose organ trafficking and seeks to find “moral and appropriate solutions” to the issue.
Wendy Rogers, a medical ethics expert at Macquarie University in Australia, said Huang’s inclusion in the conference, where there could be a meeting with Francis, risked giving a propaganda boost to China and an “air of legitimacy” to its transplantation programme.
“The Pontifical Academy of Sciences should be aware of how the endorsements – even indirect – of prestigious foreign bodies are used by China’s propaganda apparatus to burnish the reputation of its unethical transplant system,” Rogers wrote in a protest letter to a Vatican official.
“We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks. There is no evidence that this practice has ceased in China,” she wrote.
At the heart of the controversy lies a daunting question for the Vatican at a time when it is desperately seeking to re-establish ties to China: whether dialogue with Communist party officials could help spur reform on issues such as human rights and religious freedom, or whether such interactions offer legitimacy to practices that are deeply at odds with Catholic teaching, including the church’s objection to capital punishment.
In an address last year, Francis said he considered illicit organ trafficking to be a “new form of slavery”.
In his response to Rogers’ letter, which was obtained by the Guardian, Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentine bishop and chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said the conference was meant to be an “academic exercise and not a reprise of contentious political assertions”.
Huang, who has led an effort to overhaul China’s transplantation processes, has been under fire before. 

China’s use of prisoners’ organs was debated at an international conference last year after two doctors said it was premature to declare China an “ethical partner” in the international transplant community.
In 2015, Huang claimed China would no longer use organs from executed prisoners to meet the country’s high demand.
Nicholas Bequelin, regional director for East Asia for Amnesty International, said it was known at the time that the vast majority of organ transplants in China came from executed prisoners. 

The number of prisoners China executes every year is a state secret, but Bequelin said estimates ranged from 3,000 to 7,000 people annually.
Bequelin said experts had cast doubt on Huang’s claims that China had outlawed the practice, in large part because the country is yet to develop an effective national donor programme of willing participants.
“They haven’t stopped the practice and won’t stop. They have a need for organ transplants that far outpace the availability of organs,” Bequelin said.
Details of the process are grim. 

Bequelin said China did not adhere to World Health Organization recommendations on how doctors determine whether a person is legally dead. 

In China, organs have been removed before the prisoner would be considered medically dead by international standards.
“The timing of the execution is dependent on the need of a particular transplant surgery. You will execute this person at this time on this day, because that is when the patient has to be ready,” Bequelin said. 

“It is very secret and there is not a lot of reliable information.”
In testimony before a US congressional committee examining the issue last year, Francis Delmonico, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School who was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Francis, acknowledged that he could not assure the committee that the practice had been completely eradicated.

Amnesty’s Bequelin said: “It is a very optimistic view of the lay of the land in China if you think that conversations and dialogue can be on its own a significant factor. China is a system. There is a risk of naiveté about what can be achieved through rapprochement and meetings.”

The Nazi Interpol

Fears For Dissidents As China Security Czar is Appointed as the New Head of Interpol
By Dominique Rowe

Meng Hongwei (R), Chinese Vice Public Security Minister in Beijing, China, Aug. 26, 2016.

Global police body Interpol announced the appointment of its new chief Wednesday, China’s Vice Minister for public security Meng Hongwei.
Meng is the first Chinese national to take up the role as head of Interpol, but rights groups are concerned that the nomination will facilitate efforts to target Chinese dissidents living overseas, reports The Guardian.
“This is extraordinarily worrying given China’s longstanding practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad,” Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East Asia, Nicholas Bequelin, told the Guardian on Thursday.
Bequelin added that Chinese police have a “political mandate” to protect the power of the Communist party.
As part of Xi Jinping’s far-reaching crackdown on corruption, last year, Beijing launched Operation Sky Net, a campaign to nab 100 suspected corrupt former Communist Party officials who had allegedly fled overseas. 

The names were placed on Interpol’s “Red Notice” list with the aim that the police body would help extradite them back to China.
Amnesty’s fear is that some of those on the list, rather than being guilty of graft, may be political dissidents whose real crimes exist only in the eyes of the Communist Party.


Chinese Official Named Head of Interpol, Drawing Criticism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING — A top Chinese police official was elected president of Interpol on Thursday, setting off alarm bells among rights advocates over abuses and a lack of transparency within China's legal system, as well as the misuse of the police organization to attack Beijing's political opponents.
Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei was named as the first Chinese to hold the post at the organization's general assembly on the Indonesian island of Bali, Interpol announced in a press release.
The Lyon, France-based International Criminal Police Organization has 190 member nations and has the power to issue "red notices." 

It's the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today. 

Interpol circulates those notices to member countries listing people who are wanted for extradition.
While Interpol's charter officially bars it from undertaking "any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character," critics say some governments, primarily Russia and Iran, have abused the system to harass and detain opponents of their regimes. 

Interpol says it has a special vetting process to prevent that from happening.
Quoted in the Interpol release, Meng said he takes over at a time when the world is facing some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War II.
"Interpol, guided by the best set of principles and mechanisms to date, has made a significant contribution to promoting international police cooperation," Meng was quoted as saying. 

"Interpol should continue to adhere to these principles and strategies, while further innovating our work mechanisms in order to adapt to the changing security situation we see today."
Interpol's president is a largely symbolic but still influential figure who heads its executive committee responsible for providing guidance and direction and implementing decisions made by its general assembly. 

Interpol Secretary General Jurgen Stock is the organization's chief full-time official and heads the executive committee.
Meng, who takes over from Mireille Ballestrazzi of France for a four-year term, will assume his new duties immediately.
His election comes as Xi Jinping is seeking to give new momentum to his 4-year-old campaign against corruption, including a push to seek the return of former officials and other suspects who had fled abroad. 

China filed a list of 100 of its most-wanted suspects with Interpol in April 2014, about one third of whom have since been repatriated to face justice at home.
The anti-corruption drive is led by the Communist Party's internal watchdog body, the highly secretive Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, rather than the police, prompting questions about its transparency and fairness.
More than 1 million officials have been handed punishments ranging from lengthy prison terms to administrative demerits or demotions. 

While authorities deny their targets are selected for political purposes, several of the highest-profile suspects have been associated with Xi's predecessor Hu Jintao and other rivals.
China's police and judicial systems have been routinely criticized for abuses, including confessions under torture, arbitrary travel bans and the disappearance and detention without charges of political dissidents and their family members. 

That has prompted reluctance among many Western nations to sign extradition treaties with China or return suspects wanted for non-violent crimes.
China also stands accused of abducting independent book sellers who published tomes on sensitive political topics from Hong Kong and Thailand. 

U.S. officials have meanwhile complained that China has asked for the return of corruption suspects while providing little or no information about the allegations against them.
Given those circumstances, Meng's election is an "alarming prospect," said Maya Wang, Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch.
"While we think it's important to fight corruption, the campaign has been politicized and undermines judicial independence," Wang said. 

Meng's election "will embolden and encourage abuses in the system," she said, citing recent reports of close Chinese ally Russia's use of Interpol to attack President Vladimir Putin's political opponents.
Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International's regional director for East Asia, tweeted: "This is extraordinarily worrying given China's longstanding practice of trying to use Interpol to arrest dissidents and refugees abroad."
At the same time, China's 3-decade-old economic boom has produced waves of embezzlement, bribery, corruption and other forms of white-collar crime that have forced the government to spread a wide net to track down suspects and their illicit earnings. 

China also says it faces security threats from cross-border "extremist" Islamic groups seeking to overthrow Chinese rule over the far-western region of Xinjiang.
Along with electing Meng, Interpol also approved a call for the "systematic collection and recording of biometric information as part of terrorist profiles" shared by the organization.
About 830 police chiefs and senior law enforcement officials from 164 countries joined in the four-day meeting. China became a member in 1984.