“Sitting in a prison cell waiting for daybreak”: this is how the Chinese legal activist Xu Zhiyong describe The prospect of undergoing a sentence of 14 years in prison, transmitted by a Shandong court in 2023. “Crime” of XU? Plead for civil freedoms.
Xu Qin, 63, was sentenced to four years in prison when the authorities said that his human rights activism constituted an “incentive subversion”; The abuse in detention has left it paralyzed and in an urgent need for medical care.
Xu Zhiyong and Xu Qin (which are not linked) are only two of the 1,545 activists sentenced to prison by the Chinese government between 2019 and 2024, a period of increased Repression dictated by the Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping.
Beijing’s reputation to persecute its detractors is well established, but in 2017, the United Nations working group in arbitrary detention published a New dark warning: The scope and extent of arbitrary detention in China “can constitute crimes against humanity”.
OUR new research echoes this concern. In cases described in our report, activists were sentenced to entirely legal acts such as assignment On the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), entirely women’s and workers’ rights, travel or talk to parents abroadOr holding company A primary election in Hong Kong. Each level of the criminal justice system – the police, prosecutors and courts – is an accomplice of these abuses across China, stressing that the problem is widespread and systematic.
Activists paid a high price for the financial year and the promotion of human rights: the average prison sentence between 2019 and 2024 was six years, going to seven if it was found guilty of a national security crime. Three prisoners of conscience were sentenced to death and two – including an eminent Uighur professor Rahile Dawut,, which was disappeared in 2017 – were sentenced to life prison. Forty-eight activists have received sentences for a decade or more.
Some communities are disproportionately targeted. Women represent 48% of the Chinese population, but we found that they represented almost 60% of arbitrarily detained activists. Out of the more than 700 older conscience, defined as over 60 years, two thirds are women. Eight percent of all the prisoners of conscience that we have documented are Tibetans, even if they represent only 0.5% of the total population of China. And between 2019-2024, more people were found guilty of the national security crimes of “subversion” and “Incitted subversion” in Hong Kong than in mainland China, according to available data.
Authorities have relied heavily on three criminal charges. The most frequently used – “Choosing quarrels and troubles causing” – is so vague that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called On the Chinese authorities to revise it. Religious believers find themselves prosecuted to “organize and use a cult to undermine the implementation of the law”, even when their activities are legally protected. Crime convictions in the “endangering national security” category are common because the government deals with peaceful criticism as a threat to the nation.
Since his first concern about arbitrary detention as possible crimes against humanity in 2017, the same United Nations working group has repeated its alarm in 25 following cases. And in August 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights determined The fact that the Chinese government’s policies and treatment of Muslim groups in the Uighur region can also constitute crimes against humanity.
And yet, as the United Nations Human Rights Council, the flagship body of human rights in the world, encounter In Geneva, debating some of the most serious human rights crises in the world, the crimes of a government are notably absent from its program.
Beijing has managed to thwart the UN exam because it puts pressure and buy the support of other governments. Democracies came close To have a debate on the report of the Uighur region in October 2022. They should use these new conclusions on arbitrary detention to redouble the efforts to examine the CCC crimes against humanity. They should also support a special China special session at the CRH and maintain their support for independent civil society.
Thanks to the impunity that the PCC has so far appreciated, its leaders can continue to punish groups and individuals who respect the rights of rights – some of the only independent sources of information on domestic developments, such as COVID -19. Chinese officials are also embraced to commit crimes beyond the country’s borders, including harassing criticism in democracies. More governments than ever have a participation in the end of XI human rights violations.
In this same declaration of justice, Xu Zhiyong said that “his life had been an arduous journey to a dream that was also the dream of generations of Chinese before me”. To put an end to the nightmare of the vast crimes of Xi human rights, democracies should intensify international efforts to challenge Beijing crimes against humanity and align with the aspirations of human rights defenders across China.