Category: Americas

Read related stories in Mandarin: 10年来857名台湾人在中国被失踪或任意逮捕 and 强迫失踪在中国：纪念日背后的无尽悲痛与抗争  More than 800 nationals of democratic Taiwan have “disappeared” over the past 10 years in China, which has long used forced disappearances to silence and control its own dissidents and rights activists, rights groups said on Friday. Figures compiled by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and several other non-government groups showed that 857 Taiwan nationals have been “forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily arrested” in China, activists told a joint news conference in Taipei. They include publisher Li Yanhe (pen name Fu Cha), detained in Shanghai since April 2023, democracy activist Lee Ming-cheh, who served a five-year jail term in Hunan province for “attempting to subvert state power,” and businessman Lee Meng-Chu, jailed for nearly two years for “espionage” after he snapped photos of People’s Armed Police personnel at a Shenzhen hotel at the height of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Speaking on the United Nations’ International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Taiwan Association for Human Rights chief Eeling Chiu called on China to fulfill its obligations under international human rights law. “China should … immediately release those who have been forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained,” Chiu told journalists, calling on the Taiwan authorities to ratify United Nations conventions against torture and enforced disappearances as soon as possible. “[They should also] actively assist the families of those who have been arbitrarily arrested and detained in China and set up assistance mechanisms for them,” she said. Members of a support group for disappeared Taiwanese publisher Fu Cha hold up signs calling for his release to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Aug. 30, 2024. (Huang Chun-mei/RFA) Activist Wang Chia-hsuan of a petition group in support of Li Yanhe, or Fu Cha, said Li was born in China but had permanent residency in Taiwan at the time of his disappearance, having lived in Taipei for more than a decade. He has been incommunicado for 527 days, and has been detained on suspicion of “incitement to secession,” Wang said. He called on Taipei municipal authorities to step up efforts to communicate with the Chinese authorities regarding Li’s case. Lee Ming-cheh told the news conference that his disappearance and subsequent jailing put huge pressure on his family back home. “Collaborators with the Chinese government in Taiwan warned my wife off talking to Taiwanese NGOs or speaking out publicly about my case, saying they would allow her to travel to China to visit me [if she complied],” he said. “If she spoke publicly about my case, she wouldn’t be allowed to go to China,” Lee said, accusing the Chinese government of abusing current crime cooperation agreements with Taiwan to persecute its residents. Negotiating is key Ruling Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker Puma Shen said the Taiwanese authorities could do a better job of negotiating in the early stages of such cases. “Government officials … should call on China for more appropriate handling of [such] cases,” Shen said. “If that doesn’t happen, then we should cut off communication [with China].” “If we continue to communicate past that point, there will be no deterrence at all … and it will send the message that it’s OK if our people keep disappearing,” he said. Taiwanese publisher Li Yanhe in an undated photo. (Fu Cha via Facebook) Meanwhile, Taiwanese lawmaker Hung Shen-han warned that it’s not only Taiwanese who are at risk of arbitrary arrest and “disappearance” in China. “The risk to individuals of being disappeared and prosecuted in China don’t just apply to Taiwanese,” Hung said, adding that some democratic countries have issued travel advisories to their citizens on the matter. “The Chinese government uses its laws, along with various undemocratic and unsupervised practices, to threaten the personal safety of people from all countries who go to China,” he said. “Chinese citizens themselves face the same problem.” Geng He, the U.S.-based wife of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng said it has been seven years since he “disappeared” on Aug. 13, 2017. “Gao Zhisheng has been missing for seven years and 17 days, with no news or explanation, neither verbal nor written,” she told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “They deploy the whole state apparatus in its entirety to target people like Gao Zhisheng who speak the truth and work on behalf of the people,” Geng said. The couple’s entire family has also been affected, she said. “My entire family’s ID cards have been confiscated for the past 15 years now,” Geng said. “This has caused great inconvenience to my family in terms of their ability to work, go about their lives, access medical treatment and travel.” “They’re being controlled to death,” Geng said. “Basically, they can’t leave their homes.” Gao’s sister died by suicide in May 2020, while his brother-in-law also took his own life after being forced to beg the authorities to “borrow” his own ID card so he can access his cancer medication. Disappeared Chinese rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng in an undated photo. (Weiquanwang) Veteran rights lawyer Bao Longjun said the authorities have also “disappeared” his wife Wang Yu, also a prominent rights attorney, on several occasions in recent years. She was incommunicado for several hours on Wednesday during the trial of rights lawyer Yu Wensheng and activist Xu Yan in Suzhou. “I feel like it’s about ruling the country through terror,” Bao told RFA Mandarin. “There is no legal basis for [enforced disappearances].” “If you are even slightly disobedient, they will immediately bring state power to bear, forcibly restricting your freedom, and controlling you to achieve what they think is stability,” he said. Uyghurs and Tibetans Chinese authorities have also forcibly disappeared Uyghurs and Tibetans in the far-western part of mainland China. An estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been detained in Xinjiang under flimsy pretexts during mass incarcerations that began more than seven years ago in an effort by Chinese authorities to prevent religious extremism, separatism and terrorism. Former Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Teyip, who himself vanished in 2017…

All told, Uyghurs imprisoned by China in the far-western region of Xinjiang have been sentenced to a cumulative 4.4 million years, a report by Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program says. And the true tally is probably far higher, researchers said. The figure highlights the scale and severity of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the mostly Muslim Uyghurs since 2017, when thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities were herded into re-education camps and prisons. The 25-page report, “Uyghur Race as the Enemy: China’s Legalized Authoritarian Oppression & Mass Imprisonment,” frames the massive incarceration not only as a crime against humanity and genocide, but also as a form of “dangerous lawfare” designed to erode the Uyghurs’ future prospects for dignity, prosperity and freedom.  The study drew on information from the Xinjiang Victims Database, which has data on nearly 62,700 Uyghurs detained in Xinjiang, based on leaked Chinese police documents and other records. Researchers also studied records from the Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate from 2017 to 2021. It does not include numbers from years since then, after the court stopped publishing data, meaning the true number is much higher. They found 13,114 cases that included a prison sentence, with an average term of 8.8 years, and multiplied the figure by 500,000, which they called a “conservative” figure based on the 540,000 individuals prosecuted by court from 2017 to 2021, to get 4.4 million years. “This is happening on a scale that the world has not seen,” said Uyghur human rights lawyer and advocate Rayhan Asat, principal author of the report. “And if China is allowed to fulfill the 4.4 million years of a cumulative imprisonment it has sentenced the Uyghur people to, it will mean a total ethnic incapacitation for the Uyghur people.” RELATED STORIES UN rights chief calls on China to protect human rights in Tibet and Xinjiang Rights groups blast UN for inaction on China’s repression in Xinjiang Call for debate on rights violations in Xinjiang rejected by UN Human Rights Council UN human rights chief issues damning report on Chinese abuses in Xinjiang This data is crucial for understanding the profound human rights violations and the long-term impacts on the Uyghur community. ‘Legalized human rights abuse’ The Chinese government uses “legalized authoritarianism” to extend the reach of the authoritarian state by weaponizing its legal system against people critical of state policies, the report said. In the case of Xinjiang, Beijing has recognized the Uyghur identity as an enemy and has used laws such as Article 120 of the Criminal Law governing terrorist crimes, the Counter-Terrorism Law, and the Xinjiang Implementing Measures for the Counter-Terrorism Law “to legitimize human rights abuses,” it said. “The involvement of laws as a means of carrying [out] human rights abuses sufficiently characterizes Uyghur incarceration as a legalized human rights abuse,” it said. The study also noted that while the Chinese authorities make public criminal records in other parts of the country, records from almost 90% of cases in Xinjiang are not public. Asat told Radio Free Asia that she wanted to contextualize the consequences of China’s actions for the entire Uyghur population given that the mass incarceration of Uyghurs without due process and with disproportionately harsh imprisonment is already horrific in isolation.  She has publicly campaigned on behalf of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China, including her brother Ekpar Asat, who has been held in detention in Xinjiang since 2016.  “With a cumulative imprisonment of 4.4 million years — a conservative estimate — it’s nearly impossible for the population to carry on their culture and community — our culture and community,” she said. Human toll The analysis comes before the second anniversary on Aug. 31 of a report by former U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet who visited Xinjiang in May 2022 and said China’s mass detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the region may constitute crimes against humanity. Her successor, Volker Türk, this March urged China to carry out recommendations from his office to protect human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet and across the country, but Beijing ignored his call. “[In] the context of mass imprisonment, it gives an idea of just how much, human capital is lost to the Uyghur community, the Uyghur population in China as a result of what is arguably a political and arbitrary, punitive, ethnically-based system of mass imprisonment,” said David J. Simon, director of the university’s Genocide Studies Program. “The one other thing I will add about that figure is that the authors of the report have stressed to me that it is a conservative estimate — that the real number, the number of years that Uyghur political prisoners may actually be facing under these laws, could actually be substantially higher,” he told RFA. The report makes several recommendations to address the issue.  It says Türk, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, or OHCHR, and U.N. member states must trigger all accountability mechanisms to pressure China to free innocent detainees and to use diplomatic tools to collectively push for the release of all imprisoned Uyghurs. It also recommends that individual states declare they are not willing to do business with China and to impose targeted sanctions like those already imposed by the United States, Britain, the European Union and Canada. The report also recommends that the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission and the OHCHR jointly condemn Beijing’s actions and establish a Commission of Inquiry in China to investigate atrocity crimes.  “It’s been nearly a decade after China rolled out its extensive atrocity campaigns against the Uyghurs, and the world’s attention is slowly waning due to other crises emerging,” Asat said. “But the horrors in the Uyghur region have not ceased.” With additional reporting by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.