China has used draconian surveillance laws to suppress dissent: Report

February 8, 2022 Comments Off

Originally published by nord on 8 February, 2022

Peking February 8 (ANI): China has used draconian surveillance laws to suppress dissent against the country’s communist leadership.

Tens of thousands appeared to have been detained in China, under “a systematic and secret detention policy”, which allows authorities to keep anyone in jail for up to six months, The HK Post reported.

The rights group also called on Chinese leadership for abusing Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) to arbitrarily imprison people.

Housing surveillance at a designated location is a form of detention that is regularly used by Chinese authorities against individuals accused of endangering state security, the report added.

The issue includes well-known names such as artist Ai Wei Wei and human rights lawyers Wang Yu, who were captured by China’s crackdown on rights defenders in 2015. Other foreigners and political prisoners have also gone through the RSDL, as a Swedish activist, and Canadian missionaries accused of espionage in 2014.

China’s human rights defender William Nee said the use of the extrajudicial detention system had changed from an exception in its early days to a more widely used tool today.

“Before, when Ai Wei Wei was taken away, they had to make an apology because it was really about his business, or a tax issue or something like that. So there is this trend, a year or two ago, where they would use a pretend to arrest someone when the real reason was their public participation or their political views, “said Nee according to Al Jazeera.

“There was a fear of it [RSDL] would make it more routinely “legal”, given a veneer of legality and legitimacy to it. And I think it has been well covered. “Everyone involved in” public affairs “including party members and government employees is kept in a similar parallel system called liuzhi. An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people are held in liuzhi each year, Doha based publication quoting the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The conditions under these facilities have been described as tantamount to torture, and prisoners are being held in prison without the right to legal advice.

HK Post, in its report, said that RSDL exists all over the country. Prisoners are being held in a specially built facility, a converted detention center, at locations in Beijing, Tianjin, Shaanxi and Guangdong.

Handing over its new results to a UN working group on arbitrary detention, rights experts, has called on the Chinese government to end the RSDL. (ANI)