Activists denounce China’s secret residential surveillance system, arbitrary detention

On September 24, Chinese authorities released Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig after detaining them for more than 1,000 days. The pair were not held in an ordinary prison but were instead placed in “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location” (RSDL), conditions that have been compared with enforced disappearance by rights groups.

Both Canadians had limited access to a lawyer or consular services and lived in cells with lights on 24 hours a day.

Following changes to Chinese criminal law in 2012, police now have had the right to detain anyone – foreign or Chinese – for up to six months at a designated location without disclosing their whereabouts. Spain-based rights group Safeguard Defenders say that as many as 27,208 to 56,963 people have gone through China’s RSDL system since 2013, citing data from the Supreme People’s Court and the testimony of survivors and lawyers.

“These high profile cases obviously attract a lot of attention, but they shouldn’t detract from the fact that there’s no transparency. Collecting the data that is available and analyzing the trends, the estimate is every year 4 to 5,000 people are disappeared into the RSDL system alone,” said Michael Caster, a co-founder of rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders.

Caster estimated that in 2020 between 10,000 to 15,000 went through the system, up from just 500 in 2013.

The number includes well-known names like artist Ai Wei Wei and human rights lawyers Wang Yu and Wang Quanzhang, who were caught up in China’s 2015 crackdown on human rights defenders. Other foreigners have also gone through RSDL, like Peter Dahlin, a Swedish activist and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders, and Canadian missionaries Kevin and Julia Garrett, who was accused of espionage in 2014.

William Nee, a research and advocacy coordinator at China Human Rights Defenders, said since RSDL was first employed almost a decade ago, the use of the extrajudicial detention system has changed from an exception in its early days to a more widely used tool.

“Before, when Ai Wei Wei was taken away, they had to make an excuse that it was really about his business, or a tax issue or something like that. So there’s this trend, a decade or two ago, where they would use a pretense to detain someone when the real reason was their public participation or their political views,” said Nee. “There was a fear that [RSDL] was going to make it more routine ‘legal,’ given a veneer of legality and legitimacy to it. And I think that’s been well borne out.”

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES