UN Report Exposes Reprisals against Human Rights Defenders in China

September 23, 2024 Comments Off

Persistent Cases Show Defiance to International Scrutiny

(Chinese Human Rights Defenders, September 23, 2024)— As the United Nations Human Rights Council meets on September 26 to hear the latest reprisals report from the UN Secretary General’s office, the Chinese government will be named a violator. For the tenth consecutive year, it has relentlessly persecuted human rights defenders for their interactions with UN human rights bodies. UN member states should seize the opportunity to call for a special council session on China and consider the appointment of a country-specific mandate to investigate human rights abuses in China.

“Beijing punishes advocates for telling the UN about gross violations of human rights and for seeking accountability through the international system,” said Renee Xia, CHRD executive director. “For a decade now, each year, we were encouraged to see the UN calling out those abuses, but we need more urgently to see effective actions to end reprisals. Human rights defenders risk their lives to cooperate with the UN, serving as the eyes and ears of the UN human rights system. The UN must do more to protect them.”

The latest “Cooperation with the United Nations, its representatives and mechanisms in the field of human rights, a report of the UN Secretary General,” was published on September 10, 2024. That report, published annually since 2010, compiles instances of reprisals by governments against human rights defenders for their efforts to cooperate or seek to cooperate with the UN in the field of human rights, including the Human Rights Council (HRC), special procedures, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, treaty bodies, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other arenas involving peace, security and development.

In this year’s report, which covers May 1, 2023-April 30, 2024, the Chinese government is one of seven governments identified as committing new incidents of reprisals against people in China who tried to engage with the UN human rights system.

Many new concerns in this year’s report are connected to Hong Kong, reflecting how Beijing and Hong Kong officials have been systematically dismantling rights protections in the territory. This included threats of criminal prosecution for sharing information with the UN HRC’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention regarding the case of wrongfully detained Hong Kong lawyer and activist Chow Hang Tung. Additionally, the introduction of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance under Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law raised concerns of reprisals and the chilling effect on civil society under new criminal offences of “external interference” and “collaboration with an external force.” The reprisals against members of Hong Kong publishing mogul Jimmy Lai’s international legal team and their family members continued, and they have faced ongoing death threats, and threats of rape and hacking via social media and email.

Several other ongoing cases covered in this report detail the lack of adequate responses by the Chinese government and the ongoing or new acts of retaliation. Several of these cases were also raised in CHRD’s 2024 report on collective punishment of HRDs’ families. CHRD found collective punishment to be de facto state policy as no official has ever been investigated or punished for committing such acts against HRDs and their families. These include the cases of activist Li Wenzu and lawyer Wang Quanzhang, who have been under constant police surveillance and harassment. The couple’s son was unable to enroll in school because of pressure by authorities. Activist Xu Yan and lawyer Yu Wensheng have been indicted on national security charges for trying to meet with the EU ambassador to China and have faced threats against their son. Activist Wang Qiaoling and lawyer Li Heping, who along with their daughter were barred from boarding a flight due to a secret exit ban on the grounds that their travel abroad could endanger national security. Lawyer Jiang Tianyong and his elderly parents have all been denied passports to travel abroad and are under constant police surveillance.

The case of deadly reprisal against Cao Shunli also featured prominently in the new UN report. Cao, a human rights defender, died in March 2014 after she was arbitrarily detained while trying to travel to Geneva and then denied medical care in detention. Cao had been trying to learn more about the UN human rights system, especially the UPR. The 2024 reprisals report noted that on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of her death, special procedures condemned the continued failure of the government to investigate her death and bring those responsible to justice.

The report also raised concern about the ongoing persecution of Wang Yu and Chen Jianfang, who had been Cao’s lawyer and colleague, respectively. CHRD and 30 other NGOs urged “the international community to take meaningful steps to ensure accountability for ‘deadly reprisals’ against Cao.”

The UN report repeatedly stresses that its findings are not exhaustive, due to the scope and scale of repression. It notes that activists may self-censor rather than report reprisals against them, fearing further retaliation, and that “…cases were anonymized or omitted when the security risk to the individuals or their family members was deemed to be too high.” The report also said that “a number of cases brought to the attention of the Secretary-General were addressed confidentially,” some of which, CHRD understands, were connected to the Chinese government’s reprisals. Fear of retaliation for reporting cases of reprisal and the severity of the human rights atrocities in Tibet and the Uyghur regions may account for the fact that there are no named cases of Tibetans or Uyghurs in the report.

The Chinese government conduct outlined in the report—and its response rejecting the UN’s findings as “false”—reflects larger concerning trends. Beijing’s efforts to control access to information and speech in UN human rights forums is well-documented, ranging from in-person physical harassment of human rights defenders to flooding gatherings with government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs). In July 2024, the Beijing Guangming Charity Foundation, a GONGO, offered to sell its access to the HRC to Chinese businessmen, in exchange for donations of 200,000 CNY (about $28,000 USD) per person. As opportunities for civil society participation in the UN human rights processes continue to shrink, the Chinese government also continues to deny access to the country for dozens of UN human rights experts, permitting visits only by those whose assessments it deemed it could control.

Beijing’s reprisals have not only caused harm to human rights defenders and obstructed their work, but also are detrimental to the UN system as a whole. Independent reporting by civil society on developments inside the country are one of the few avenues for informed scrutiny on the human rights situation of one of the most powerful member states of the UN. The Chinese government has been clear that it is seeking to lower the human rights standards that underpin the UN system, thus putting HRDs and civil society globally at risk of weak standards, and enabling state impunity. Human rights defenders across China take enormous risks to carry out their work, as the new report reflects, to promote the rights to free speech and the rule of law, fundamental to any engagement with China by any stakeholders for the purpose of promoting human rights.

CHRD urges UN Member States to take seriously these findings in the secretary-general’s reprisals report when voting at the UN General Assembly to elect members to the HRC. HRC members are expected to uphold “high human rights standards” and states named as violators in the reprisals report have failed to meet that expectation. That China has been named 10 years in a row in the annual reports is unequivocal evidence that the government should not be sitting on the Council.

“The UN Human Rights Council should match the extraordinary resilience of human rights defenders across China. A decade of well-documented reprisals demands no less,” said Xia.

Contact for this press release:

Renee Xia, Executive Director, CHRD, at reneexia@nchrd.org

Shane Yi, Researcher, CHRD, at shaneyi@nchrd.org