Despite repeated complaints from the Chinese government, April 14 saw the hosting of a hearing-style event in the EU Parliament on China’s unjust imprisonment of European citizens and foreigners in general, with a slew of first-hand testimonies from actual victims and family representatives. The event, “Piercing the veil of imprisonment in China”, was led by Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Miriam Lexmann (EPP/Slovakia) and co-organized by MEPs Engin Ergoglu (Renew/Germany) and Marketa Gregorova (Greens/Czechia), in a large 80-seat hall filled with MEPs from across the political spectrum, alongside media, scholars, lawyers and family of victims.
[A video of the event, with certain anonymous contributions removed, is available at the linked site.]
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MEP Lexmann ... said that
"human rights must be at the centre of our relations with China. This means addressing credible reports of human rights abuses, including the arbitrary use of incarceration of foreign nationals, and ensuring that our policies do not contribute to or enable them."
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The testimonies were led by the UK’s Peter Humphrey, a former detainee and prisoner in China, who took the role as lead panelist setting the scene for the discussion, alongside remarks on his own two-year-long incarceration in a pre-trial detention centre and later a prison in Shanghai. Having spearheaded the creation of the event himself, he explained:
“Why am I so involved in all this imprisonment stuff? I spent 20 years in mainstream journalism and then 15 years in investigations. I have spent over 50 years in all involved with China in various roles - and two of those years were in Xi Jinping’s prisons. My American wife was imprisoned at the same time. Both of us were falsely accused of illegal information gathering for my due diligence company, ChinaWhys.”
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Two surprise witnesses also took center stage: France’s Francois Dupouy, whose Chinese husband has spent over five years in prison, with another six years to serve on what Peter Humphrey described as clearly homophobic and political persecution; another French victim, anonymously referred to as Remy, who was subjected to severe torture and beatings during two years of detention.
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Peter Humphrey provided information and made remarks relating to some 25 European citizens who have faced detention and imprisonment in China, often on arbitrary grounds (see list at bottom). Marius Balo cited a young female Romanian victim largely ignored by the Romanian government when he said, "the event allowed stories of injustice to be shared, including that of a 28-year-old Romanian woman imprisoned there for more than eight years. The Romanian government, still communist in thinking, did nothing to help her."
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To some visible shock, Peter Humphrey produced copies of numerous products made in the Chinese prison where he and others were held, products which were readily available in supermarkets and malls across Europe; and Marius Balo described his prison facility as really being a large factory, where cell blocks took up only a small part of the facility. The Swedish citizen Peter Dahlin, referencing a forthcoming report from Safeguard Defenders, said 32% of surveyed prisoners were forced to work without any pay at all – while others have pointed out that while they officially received a certain pay, the actual payment received shrank because much of it was skimmed in acts of corruption by the prison authorities.
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In his brief presentation before the discussions, Peter Dahlin also outlined the RSDL system, residential surveillance at a designated location, which takes the powerlessness of a pre-trial detainee to new extremes, where people are kept at secret locations, for up to half a year, incommunicado from the outside world, and without legal counsel. This system, designed to be a rare exception, now grabs tens of thousands of victims per year. It has been systematically used in politically sensitive cases, as well as against at least 21 foreign citizens that we know of so far.
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Peter Humphrey spotlighted the USA’s Levinson act, and its establishment of a Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEA). “Today the European Union has no legislation comparable to the American Levinson Act which sets out criteria to designate an American prisoner held overseas as arbitrarily detained or as a hostage."
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He went on to point out that there is a Chinese legal mechanism to get a prisoner out of China that most governments are not using. “Even China has a law that can help European governments get their citizens out of Chinese prisons. A Chinese law promulgated in 2018 allows any country - even a country that has no bilateral prisoner transfer agreement with Beijing - to initiate a discussion with Chinese judicial authorities to transfer a citizen from a Chinese jail to one in their home country,” he said. “But most governments have not bothered to look at this, or even notice it, except perhaps France,“ he added.
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Peter Dahlin outlined the failures of European governments to act on cases in a coordinated manner. He showcased how, when a citizen of an EU member state is detained by China and there is a clear political motive or revenge motive aimed at gaining diplomatic leverage, the country is largely left standing alone, and that China has clearly anticipated and exploited this as part of its divide-and-rule strategy to pick off EU countries one by one, knowing there is unlikely to be a coordinated response.
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Ding Lebin [and exiled German-based Chinese citizen, whose parents have been jailed on multiple occasions and tortured for practicing the falungong religion] warned that "the CCP is using the persecution of Falun Gong as an ongoing testing ground for methods of repression against other religious communities and human rights defenders.“ With the recent expansion of the crackdown on Christian "house churches", his words rang eerily true. It would benefit the EU and its member states to pay closer attention not only as it is the moral right thing to do, but to identify changes that may later be applied to a wide variety of other groups.
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Ding Lebin called on "The European Union, the G7, and EU member states [to] initiate an independent international investigation into this persecution, make freedom of religion and belief in China a core component of national security objectives when engaging with Communist China, expand sanctions against CCP perpetrators, and combat transnational repression.”