Latest for @dw_chinese - On Monday, 10 @UN Human Rights experts issued a public statement to express their concern over the forced disappearance and detention of three human rights activists in #China. The three of them are currently put under #RSDL. dw.com/zh/%E8%81%94%E…
Ding Jia-Xi, Zhang Zhong-shun and Dai Chen-ya were part of the 9 Chinese activists who were arrested by Chinese police on December 26, after they attended a dinner on December 13 in Xiamen to discuss about the political and social situation in #China.
All three of them have since been transferred to "Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location," which according to @yujiechentw, allows the Chinese police to interrogate the detainees at any point and they can be detained up to six months.
The method is often accompanied by charges like "subversion of state," which have both been widely used by the Chinese government to target Chinese activists and outspoken intellectuals.
The UN experts argued that RSDL is against the International Human Rights Law but the Chinese government continues to use it to crack down on activists and government critics.
I talked to Zhang Chung-Shun's daughter @mofeizhang1 about her father's forced disappearance and what happened to her mom since then.
She said since her father's arrest, the family has only received four documents with very vague content. Each time, the police used a different charge against her father. Ultimately, the family was "verbally informed" that her father has committed "subversion of state."
And during a raid that the police carried out against her father, her mom was detained for six hours at the local police station in Yentai City, as the police wanted to force her to sign a document to admit that her husband has illegally possessed live ammunition.
@mofeizhang1's mother refused to do it and her phone was subsequently tapped by the police. Ever since then, the police can always monitor her mom's phone calls.
Furthermore, when her mom tried to leave #China to join @mofeizhang1 in the US for Chinese New Year, her mom was stopped by the customs officer at the airport and they told her mom that she couldn't leave China because she could "pose a threat to national security."
They abolished her mom's passport at the customs and she has since been completely controlled by the Chinese police. "At first, she couldn't use the Internet at home and her phone would also have no signal when she was at home," @mofeizhang1 told me.
While she understands the risk of speaking up for her father, @mofeizhang1 asks the Chinese government to give citizens more space to help each other and push the society towards a more positive development.
"I hope the Chinese government can follow the law to handle my dad's case, and if the existing law is not sufficient to handle the case, I think they should pass new laws. Law should not become the tool to safeguard leader's powers, instead, it should be used to ...
... defend commoner's welfare," Zhang told me.
@FrancesEveCHRD told me that the Chinese government is refusing to let the three detainees to meet their lawyers on the ground that they may "endanger national security."
"Police will likely try and force them to "fire" the human rights lawyers hired by their families, to coerce confessions that their legitimate human rights activities are a crime, and to punish them for their human rights activism," said Frances.
"Taking action like the UN human rights expert to publicly call out human rights abuses in China puts the government under the spotlight because the Chinese government still cares about its reputation. It's important for the UN and its member states to hold China accountable."
