The Continuing Attack on China's Human Rights Lawyers

By Jerome A. Cohen

Human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi

The title of this latest valuable message from IAPL Monitoring, “Rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi remains under police investigation,” sounds much too innocuous to encapsulate what is taking place. “Remains under police investigation” does not do justice to the gross injustice being perpetrated by the Linyi Public Security Bureau (PSB), the PSB that so abused the blind “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng in so many ways from 2005 until his extraordinary escape in 2012. 

Human rights lawyer Ding has been held incommunicado for almost one year since his detention following the small HR lawyers meeting last December in Xiamen. If the experience of so many others is a guide, he is undoubtedly being subjected to tortures of various kinds.

What is interesting about this latest sad report of the plight of “disappeared lawyers” is the apparent refusal of the local procuracy to accept the PSB’s recommendation for prosecution on two occasions, presumably because the police are not deemed to have made out the case for “inciting subversion of state power”. In these circumstances Ding should be released free and clear or at least granted the PRC equivalent of “bail” if there is need for the investigation to continue. 

The PSB rejects this proper course and continues to try again. The procuracy should order the PSB to at least grant the defense lawyer’s request for bail. Yet, in order to avoid embarrassment and accountability for the police and to avoid sanctions against the procuracy itself, it continues to send the case back for more evidence. The procuracy is caught in a dilemma, trying to do its duty to carry out the legal protections prescribed in the PRC Criminal Procedure Law to prevent an unjustifiable indictment and yet not run afoul of the Communist Party’s insistence that the police, procuracy and courts operate as “a single fist” in such cases.

I assume the Linyi City Party Political-Legal Committee will resolve the problem since, legally, the procuracy cannot continue at this point to keep sending the request for prosecution back to the police for further “investigation”.

DING’S LAWYERS GROUP WAS A MODERATE CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATION. If I were a Hong Kong lawyer working for civic, political and legal reforms, I would take note of the Mainland precedents and be very worried about Hong Kong’s deteriorating constitutional prospects and my own future. For example, Dennis Kwok, the able and dynamic lawyer representing the Hong Kong legal profession in the Legislative Council until his Wednesday ouster by the NPCSC, intends to return to law practice and continue, as a citizen as well as a barrister, his opposition to the new National Security Law. Should he be prepared for detention and “investigation” for alleged “inciting subversion against state power”? Now that the Mainland security organizations have come to dominate HK, will he be subjected to the same incommunicado “investigation” procedures and punishments as Mainland lawyer Ding?

Case of Chinese Lawyer Qin Yongpei Submitted to Seven UN Offices

By Jerome A. Cohen

Lawyer Qin Yongpei

Here, to mark the first anniversary of the incommunicado detention of the valiant and imaginative Chinese defense lawyer Qin Yongpei, is the remarkable submission of his plight to no fewer than seven UN human rights offices by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders. CHRD has written a communiqué outlining the timeline of Qin’s arrest and alleging subsequent arbitrary detention and torture.

Qin’s case has followed what by now is a familiar course. First, like many HR lawyers, he was picked up, held, intimidated, warned and released in 2015. When he persisted in carrying out his lawyer’s obligations, in 2018 he was disbarred from law practice and his law firm dissolved. After ingeniously forming an ostensible business consultancy in order to continue their work, he and some disbarred colleagues added to their challenges to the police-prosecutors-judges triumvirate by establishing a “Disbarred China Lawyers Club” that exposed official corruption and abuses of power as well as the environmental depredations of a local mining company. That proved to be the last straw for the targets of his public efforts, and he was then “disappeared” by the targets in 2019. There is as yet, one year later, apparently no further news of him.

What a tangle it must be now for the seven different UN groups, including the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and several Special Rapporteurs, to decide how best to reconcile their overlapping jurisdictions in order to vigorously pursue their duties. Their inquiries may evoke a PRC response and speed up the processing of this typically sad case. Surely it should not continue unnoticed by the world community.

Should the US Take China's Threats of Arbitrary Detentions Seriously?

By Jerome A. Cohen

This recent Wall Street Journal article reports that Chinese officials have threatened to detain U.S. citizens in response to the Justice Department’s prosecution of Chinese military-affiliated scholars. The case of the two Canadian Michaels shows that this may not be an empty threat. Both men were swiftly detained following the initiation of extradition proceedings against Huawei’s Ms. Meng in Vancouver. It will be two years in December and there is no prospect of their release since the Canadian case moves forward at a snail’s pace. So, we know that the PRC may well mean business in threatening to detain Americans in retaliation for prosecutions in the US.

Yet the PRC has suffered a huge amount of international condemnation for this blatant example of “hostage diplomacy,” and an obvious effort to extend this practice to a number of Americans will outrage and disgust the liberal democratic world while perhaps pleasing many other nations in the UN that support or fail to criticize the PRC’s human rights violations.

The PRC appears to recognize the grave consequences that would result from a blatant resort to detentions as threatened, which may be why several months have passed with no obvious retaliatory detentions. Perhaps, as with so many other aspects of Sino-American relations, Beijing is awaiting the outcome of the American election. If it should follow through on these threats, it would be providing an enormous stimulus to significant further “decoupling.” Can that be in Beijing’s interest? There must be intense debate at the top.

More about the prosecution of the "Hong Kong 12"

By Jerome A. Cohen

Now that the arrests of the Hong Kong 12 have been approved, after 37 days of incommunicado detention, there is not likely to be much news about the case emanating from the PRC for a few months, unless international pressure stimulates Beijing to a quicker than usual response. But the pot continues to boil on the HK side. 

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has a good article entitled “China Snatched the ‘Hong Kong 12’ Off a Speedboat, Giving Protest Movement New Life.” It reports that families of the detainees continue to call for their return to HK (instead of being prosecuted in the mainland), a fruitless demand at this point. More interestingly, it notes that the families claim that it took five days before they learned that the suspects were being held in Shenzhen and quotes the father of one of the suspects to the effect that the families have still been told nothing about their case, apparently either by the HKG or PRC officials. 

It has previously been reported that the PRC has not allowed PRC lawyers retained by the families to enter the case and indeed has used the usual methods to prevent their participation. More recent, however, is the father’s claim that the PRC lawyers reportedly imposed on the suspects “have never contacted us. They wouldn’t even tell us the lawyers’ names.”  

It is quite possible that no lawyers have yet been assigned to the case, since the interrogations of the suspects and investigation are apparently not yet complete. Usually in the PRC, as a matter of practice, defense lawyers are not permitted to enter the case at least until the police have obtained confessions and believe the basis for indictment is well-prepared. At that point, there is little that lawyers can do to advise the suspects except to prepare them for what is to come, and the possibilities for lawyers to conduct their own investigation from witnesses and obtain other relevant defense information are highly restricted. Even then, lawyers are often not permitted to try to act until after indictment, and only cursorily, before being permitted to appear in the eventual trial, largely as window dressing.

In the meantime, HK attention is growing with respect to reports that the HK police may have played a secret but active role in alerting PRC police colleagues to the suspects’ plan for escape from HK to Taiwan. It will be important to see how the story unfolds.

The Impact of HK's NSL on Canada-China Relations

By Jerome A. Cohen

Yesterday the Canadian Parliament’s Special Committee on Canada-China relations held a three-hour session regarding the new Hong Kong National Security Law (NSL). I joined several others, including Michael Davis, Samuel Chu and Annie Boyajian, to discuss the impact that the NSL will have on foreign citizens in the China mainland, Hong Kong, and Canada. I urged the Canadian government to do more to protect Chinese-Canadians in light of the increased risk of arbitrary detention and other acts of harassment and intimidation. There was also brief reference to extradition problems. You can watch the recording here and read the news report here.

Indefinite Confinement under China's Mental Health Laws--Another Type of Arbitrary Detention?

By Jerome A. Cohen

Chi Yin, formerly an Intermediate Court judge in China and now my colleague at NYU Law School’s US-Asia Law Institute, and I have just published a Diplomat piece on detention in China’s mental hospitals. The article follows the case of Feng Xiaoyan, who was taken to a mental hospital by her husband after being arrested, but then released, for distributing pro-democracy pamphlets. Although she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, her daughter maintains that her mother is entirely sane and was only taken to the hospital by her husband because of the threat that her political activism posed to his career. China has a law against involuntary admission except in certain instances. Yet involuntary confinement seems to occur to a disturbing extent, and patients can end up in indefinite legal limbo with little recourse. You can read the full piece here.

The Impact of the Hong Kong National Security Law—Outside of Hong Kong

By Jerome A. Cohen

Recently, the State Department warned US citizens in China to “exercise increased caution” in light of the new Hong Kong national security law although it cautiously does not mention the law by name. We are all waiting to see how the PRC interprets Article 38 of the new NSL for HK that on its face purports to cover speech and other conduct by anyone anywhere that the PRC claims to have violated the HKNSL.

The notice is available to all Americans who might plan to travel to China as well as those already there. It is interesting that it warns that consular access might be denied. Even the two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who were detained 18 months ago, had Canadian consular access until this past January when it was cut off allegedly because of Covid-19. The problem is that the PRC version of consular access is very limited. Meetings usually occur once a month at best, they are short, and it is not permitted to even discuss the case that led to the detention. Moreover, PRC commitments to allow appointment of a defense lawyer are not honored. 

The PRC may modify the NSL's extraordinary breadth by announcing additional prerequisites to prosecution in the law itself and/or by demonstrating in its application of the law or through informal public statements that it recognizes that the literal wording goes too far and won’t be applied. But, so far as I know, it has not yet done any of these things. PRC authorities may be scrambling to come to a conclusion about what to do to meet the rising world concern and opposition.

In the interim, Article 38 has certainly had a strong deterrent impact in many countries and is already affecting the calculations of many NGOs and ordinary citizens abroad about their plans and conduct. The State Department is of course most immediately concerned about Americans currently within China’s borders, presumably including Hong Kong, since they are subject to immediate enforcement of the broadest interpretation of 38 if that is the path the PRC decides to pursue. But it should surely notify anyone who, although not currently in China, is planning to travel there, including those who may merely be planning to pass through en route to further destinations.

It is interesting to see the emphasis on private electronic communications. The email warns citizens that they may be detained or deported “for sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese government.” What is the State Department’s premise? That emails and phone calls wholly between persons outside China are susceptible to PRC monitoring and potentially subject to prosecution? Internet chats? Direct communications between someone outside China and someone inside? “Only” communications wholly within China? The NSL has already had an impact outside of Hong Kong, but it is still unclear what the full impact will be. However, I suppose we have to be grateful that the HKNSL has done a lot to alert the world to the dangers of arbitrary detention in China that too many have long ignored. 

More About Canada, China, and Arbitrary Detention

By Jerome A. Cohen

As I have written here before, in the Gao Zhan espionage case in 2001, the US State Dept and the PRC MOFA quietly agreed that she would be released on ostensible medical grounds but only after first being convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Her trial followed shortly afterward, and she was released 48 hours after sentencing. Because of the added Meng extradition element in the current Canadian dispute with China, the Gao Zhan case is not analogous to that of the two Michaels but its resolution is relevant. Although Gao was not yet an American citizen, she was on the cusp, and she had tremendous public support from the US academic community because she was a US-trained and US-based scholar of Chinese society engaged in fieldwork in China. Her detention and prosecution seemed to threaten all serious foreign scholars working in China. Only later was it discovered that she had been secretly working for Taiwan intelligence - as well as also earning a living by illegally exporting to the PRC American high-tech electronic equipment that was banned from export under the US Trading with the Enemy Act. This was no simple multitasking but “walking on two legs” following Mao’s famous maxim. 

Although I believe, with Trudeau, that Canada should not yield to PRC hostage diplomacy, if it should do so eventually, it should certainly not do so on the basis of the PRC first convicting the two Michaels of the crime charged. They could instead be released sequentially on one medical excuse or other prior to trial. The PRC might try to negotiate their convictions for respective minor offenses as a face-saving measure in a pathetic attempt to justify their long, barbaric detentions. Years ago, during the Jiang Zemin era, when at trial a courageous defense lawyer demonstrated that the PRC could not plausibly convict a Chinese employee of the NYTimes Beijing Bureau of leaking state secrets to a foreign organization, in order to justify the years of his pre-trial detention the Beijing High Court convicted him of a much lesser, unrelated offense that had arisen from what was really more of a civil dispute than a criminal matter. 政治掛帥, zhengzhi guashuai! Politics is always in command of the Chinese courts, as Xi Jinping and his minions repeatedly advocate.

Arbitrary Detention, Canada and the National Security Law for Hong Kong

By Jerome A. Cohen

This recent article details the disgraceful PRC arbitrary detention of the two Michaels and the understandable strains this has placed on domestic Canadian politics as well as Ottawa’s relations with China. In a recent letter, a number of prominent Canadians urged the prime minister to end Meng Wanzhou’s extradition process in exchange for Michael Kovrig’s and Michael Spavor’s release. Despite the emotional pressure that all of us feel in sympathy with the tragic, unfair plight of the Michaels, Prime Minister Trudeau’s decision not to yield to hostage diplomacy is undoubtedly the right one from the viewpoint of Canadian law, values and government, as well as Canada’s international relations generally and its continuing contributions to public international law. An equally prominent group of Canadians recognized this in an answering second letter.

The right course for the authors of both letters and for all who want to end hostage diplomacy by powerful dictatorial regimes is to join forces and press all democratic governments to denounce and excoriate the PRC’s gross misconduct in every available forum. The current public effort of the UN Human Rights Special Procedures experts to condemn China’s forthcoming National Security Law for Hong Kong is only one excellent precedent to emulate. Although Beijing’s veto precludes UN Security Council action, and Beijing’s influence over the UN General Assembly and even the UN Human Rights Council still staves off significant actions by those institutions, the impressive large group of politically independent UN human rights experts who have courageously signed this just-released statement have taken a very important step that deserves the fullest world appreciation. 

Indeed, there is a link between these two outrageous situations. The fate of the two Michaels demonstrates how arbitrarily the PRC Party-controlled apparatus can be manipulated in the name of “national security.” Kovrig may indeed be deemed the unwitting vanguard of Hong Kong-based political experts to be sacrificed in the PRC in the name of China’s “national security.”

Beijing’s agenda to enact national security legislation governing Hong Kong: some initial thoughts

By Jerome A. Cohen

Obviously the current plan to enact national security legislation governing Hong Kong is not Beijing’s preferred way but is a mark of desperation. If it had been attempted much earlier in the post-’97 period, especially before the Article 23 fiasco in Hong Kong in 2003, it might have passed legal muster without creating as much consternation as it does now.

At this time, however, coming in the wake of the failures to enact relevant security legislation via Article 23 and the inability of LegCo to do so in the future on its own, Beijing’s current move certainly looks like a clever trick that inevitably inspires even greater popular distrust than ever in the NPC Standing Committee’s interpretations of the Basic Law.

The NPC Standing Committee will undoubtedly prevail in technical PRC legal terms, given the wording and structure of the Basic Law, the provisions for its interpretation and the way those provisions have been applied in recent years. But the political costs to the Central Government and the people of Hong Kong will be very high.

This will not be the formal end of “One Country Two Systems,” but it is surely a mortal wound to the living, meaningful system that many had been misled into hoping for. The people of Hong Kong should prepare to cope with the varieties of arbitrary detention that have been inflicted on compatriots elsewhere in China who have tried to exercise freedoms of expression. The Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of National Security will no longer have to operate secretly in the SAR. Both will soon have agencies formally and openly established there. Their promised “enforcement mechanisms” can be relied upon to eliminate dissent in Hong Kong almost as efficiently as they have done on the Mainland.

There are many ways that the United States, the UK and other democratic countries can strongly react to Beijing’s latest legal legerdemain. Perhaps Washington will invoke some aspects of existing federal legislation relating to Hong Kong, but I hope it does not act in ways that will penalize Hong Kong’s already long-suffering people rather than the regime that increasingly dictates to them.

Why Has China Claimed the Detained Bookseller Gui Minhai Restored his Chinese Nationality? An International Law Innovation???

By Jerome A. Cohen

A few colleagues and I have had some discussion on Gui Minhai’s case, in particular why the Chinese government forced Gui to regain Chinese nationality in 2018. In fact, as a colleague pointed out, Gui’s is not the first case of this kind. His fellow bookseller Lee Bo, who was disappeared from Hong Kong and reappeared in Mainland custody in December 2015, also supposedly renounced his British citizenship while in detention.

As China does not allow dual nationality, the Chinese government claims that Gui gave up his Swedish citizenship when regaining Chinese nationality. But this tactic is abusive and also contrary to international law (Read also Tom Kellogg’s excellent article on “News of a Kidnapping: The Gui Minhai Case and China's Approach to International Law“ here). Below is my colleague Yu-Jie Chen’s take, with my own response following.

Regarding Gui's citizenship, Sweden's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that “Swedish citizenship can only be renounced after an examination and a decision by the Swedish Migration Agency,” so it seems that from the Swedish point of view, Gui is still a citizen despite China's claim otherwise.

China's tactic of coercing Gui into restoring Chinese nationality is apparently to deflect international criticism and to also bypass its obligations towards Sweden under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (consular visits & the arrangement of legal representation etc). I think the Swedish government should argue that China has violated international law and Sweden's sovereign rights in this case. Given Beijing's expansive notions of sovereignty, it'd be interesting to see its response, but I wouldn't hold my breath.  

There's also a bigger issue for the international system — if China could keep doing this, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations will be undermined. Obviously, what's the use of having China's commitment to facilitating consular protection if there's a cunning way to exclude its application in the first place?

Yu-jie has identified the general implications of the PRC actions against Gui and Sweden for implementation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Let’s think for a moment. The PRC’s innovative rationale and practice purporting to erase the foreign nationality of a former PRC national, if acquiesced to by the world community, are easily capable of extension to all foreign nationals, whatever their backgrounds. If, for example, I should be permitted to return to China again, the PRC might detain me and then announce that I have applied for PRC nationality while in custody and that my application has been accepted, with the consequence, according to PRC law, that I have surrendered my American nationality!

This novel technique would render meaningless not only the PRC’s obligations — and other countries’ rights — under the Vienna Convention but also the respective obligations and rights under all of the PRC’s many bilateral treaties concerning consular matters! Foreigners who enter China would then have no protection against arbitrary detention and their governments would be deprived of one of their basic sovereign rights. This should hurt the feelings of all foreign people! Caveat traveler!! And this heinous practice could be further extended to apply to anyone whom the PRC kidnaps from outside China, like Gui, and secretly transports to the PRC!

Freedom from Arbitrary Detention in Asia: Lessons from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong

By Jerome A. Cohen

In 2018 I co-authored an article with my colleague Yu-Jie Chen on "Freedom from Arbitrary Detention in Asia: Lessons from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong" (in Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Asia, David Law, Holning Lau and Alex Schwartz eds., forthcoming). In light of the Hong Kong protests since last June, we have accordingly updated the article and added discussion of police arrests and detention in Hong Kong. The revised article can be downloaded here.

It's good to write about a subject highly relevant to what's going on, but it can also be nightmarish to try to stay up-to-date in a multi-year book project! We hope the Handbook can be published as soon as possible. 

Latest PRC detention of a Japanese national

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is a good analysis of the latest PRC detention of a Japanese national, Why Did China Detain a Japanese History Professor?. The Japanese history professor, Iwatani Nobu, was invited to Beijing by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for a conference and was then detained for allegedly possessing “illicit material,” which appears to have been old books and journals that he had purchased at a second-hand bookstore in Beijing. He was eventually released in November 2019.

It reminds me of the case of Song Yongyi, the Dickinson College librarian and Cultural Revolution expert, who was detained early in this century in China for collecting “state secrets” that were actually wall posters from the Cultural Revolution that had been publicly posted in China three decades earlier. I served as pro bono counsel in Song's case. Huge American pressure, especially from the academic community, finally led to his freedom after six months of incommunicado secret police detention but before prosecution.

In the Iwatani case, it would be important to interview him about the details of his detention. He cannot have “pleaded guilty,” as the report says, since he was apparently never brought to court. It is not clear what he allegedly “confessed” to. What were the “Illicit activities” – buying old books in a public book store? What form of detention did he receive? Apparently, he was allowed brief consular visits every month or so but what was he permitted to discuss with the consul? I think an earlier report suggested that he never saw a defense lawyer. Was he indicted? Is he, although released, free to be interviewed or does he feel obligated to adhere to a commitment to post-release silence extracted as part of the release bargain? Has the Japanese Government admonished him to keep silent? Did the GOJ assure the PRC that Iwatani would keep quiet for the first year?  These questions come up in the many similar cases involving foreign nationals’ detention in the PRC. 

Eliminating arbitrary detention in China: a Whac-A-Mole game

By Jerome A. Cohen

China has reportedly eliminated the formal administrative detention system for sex workers (see BBC report), which was never successful in “reforming” the offenders. This is, of course, good news for other reasons as well. This sanction was sometimes used for political purposes to ensnare the alleged customers of sex workers, men who allegedly patronized prostitutes but whose real offense was conduct disliked by the regime. As the report indicates, prostitutes are still subject to up to 15 days of detention in a Public Security Bureau detention cell for violation of the Security Administration Punishment  Law, which is also administered by the police. This constitutes a minor offense that in China is technically not a “crime”. Yet detention cell conditions are often extremely unpleasant in comparison with prison conditions for those who are formally convicted of “crimes”.

I wonder whether there is any support for formally eliminating long-term administrative custody for drug offenders, who used to constitute the majority of persons detained under “reeducation through labor.”  To be sure, as Xinjiang’s massive administrative detentions demonstrate, trying to eliminate arbitrary police detention in China is a Whac-A-Mole game—just as you think a form of detention is gone, others keep popping up again under slightly revised names.

The Many Forms of Arbitrary Detention in China

By Jerome A. Cohen

Yesterday was International Human Rights Day. As we look back at Beijing’s human rights record this past year, one of the most troubling abuses in China continues to be arbitrary detention (I’ve written about this subject with Yu-Jie Chen, SSRN here).

Rights lawyers are often the target for such abuses. Persisting prominent examples are lawyers WANG Quanzhang and YU Wensheng, who remain in detention. Foreign critics and activists are not spared. YANG Hengjun, for example, a famous Australian-Chinese blogger, has been detained on the charge of espionage since January. Policy experts like Michael Kovrig and business people like Michael Spavor, the two Canadians detained in China after Canada arrested Huawei’s CFO in accordance with the U.S. extradition request, have been in detention for a year. Just to name a few.

The victims often suffer prolonged detention in a non-transparent process. While China’s Criminal Procedure Law provides some legal time limits on holding detained and arrested persons, there are exceptions to these limits that the police and procuracy have the liberty to invoke in practice. For example, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) can approve unlimited extensions of time for a criminal investigation! What is less clear is whether the NPCSC, when approving extensions, is supposed to issue a public notice to this effect as it does with other actions. Has the NPCSC ever done so?

Another technique for exceeding the prescribed criminal procedure time limits is for the police to restart the clock on the ground that investigation of the suspect has revealed the need to investigate another major crime that the suspect may have committed. My impression is that this has frequently been done in practice but with no systematic reporting of such important decisions to the outside world. Papers are processed within the police bureaucracy, and perhaps the procuracy is informed if it has inquired.

If police officials deign to acknowledge inquiries from a defense lawyer or family member, they might well release this often spurious “new crime” rationale for extending the detention time of a suspect whose case has been delayed for political or other meretricious reasons. But there is no way in practice for such a decision to be effectively challenged. When the case finally comes to trial, the rationale for the delayed detention might often be mentioned in the indictment and would be in the appended police documentation of the case and usually mentioned in the account of procedure rendered in the court’s judgment. Yet these are formalities, not protections.

Of course, it is important to bear in mind that in practice people are often detained in the criminal process in blatant disregard of prescribed limits (Think Gui Minhai, the Swedish national who was kidnapped from Thailand and now disappeared in the arms of Mainland police).

Moreover, with the recent introduction of the “supervision commission” process, suspects can be detained for 6 months before a decision is made about whether to turn the victim over to the formal criminal process or some other sanction.

Finally, there are also other supposedly “non-criminal” detention procedures such as those still existing for drug and prostitution offenders. Others are also detained wholly outside the formal criminal process and even outside the formal police short-term administrative detention process that annually punishes many millions of people for up to 15 days in jail. Of the more than one million Chinese Muslims who have been detained in Xinjiang’s re-education camps, only a minority have been detained under formal criminal procedures.

This is not an exhaustive list. The PRC has mastered many forms of arbitrary detention.

PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson should read human rights treaties China has ratified

PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson should read Human rights treaties China has ratified

By Jerome A. Cohen

 I’ve been following the case of Yang Hengjun, an Australian blogger detained in China since January this year. Here’s the latest excellent Guardian piece on Yang’s case.  It vividly brings home the millions of individual, unfair tragedies inflicted by PRC criminal justice. 

Once again, the PRC has issued a preposterous response to the Australian Government’s condemnation of the terrible abuse of one of its nationals. Can the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson not realize how ridiculous his statement makes his government appear? To say that Australia is interfering with China’s “judicial sovereignty” by protesting the PRC’s violation of the international human rights to which the PRC has freely committed itself in the exercise of its sovereignty is nonsense. Perhaps PRC spokesman Geng should be reading the UN Convention against Torture in addition to the latest words of Xi Jinping. To say that Yang has been treated in accordance with Chinese law is a shocking, frank indictment of the PRC legal system before the world. It is good to have a recently-published retranslation of DARKNESS AT NOON, since the Chinese Communist Party’s daily actions illustrate how it perpetuates the tradition of endless incommunicado detentions and coercive interrogations. What a perfect way to celebrate the PRC’s 70th anniversary!