Tom Phillips - Your only right is to obey': lawyer describes torture in China's secret jails
On day one of his
detention Xie Yang claims he was shackled to a metal chair and ordered to
explain why he had joined an illegal anti-Communist party network. On day two
he was moved to a secret prison and informed: “Your only right is to obey.” Finally,
on day three, the violence began.
“We’ll torture you to
death just like an ant,” one inquisitor allegedly warned the Chinese human
rights lawyer during a punishing marathon of interrogation sessions and
beatings designed make him confess to crimes he denies. “I’m going to torment
you until you go insane,” another captor allegedly bragged. “Don’t even imagine
that you’ll be able to walk out of here and continue being a lawyer. You’re
going to be a cripple.” The claims – impossible to verify but which human
rights activists say are consistent with previously
documented forms of abuse in China – are contained in a transcript of
lawyers’ interviews with one victim of the country’s ongoing crackdown on human
rights attorneys.
Xie Yang, a
44-year-old lawyer, was detained in the central city of Hongjiang on 11 July
2015, on day three of what campaigners describe as an
unprecedented Communist party assault on civil rights attorneys. More than
18 months after that crackdown began, at least four of its key targets,
including Xie, remain behind bars facing trial for crimes including subversion.
Xie’s legal team decided to release the explosive and highly detailed
transcript of their conversations with him last week – in defiance of
authorities – in protest at the refusal to set their client free.
His statement paints a
devastating portrait of the tactics allegedly being used to wage China’s
so-called “war on law”. It comes after Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights
activist who worked with several of the detained lawyers, gave the
most detailed account yet of his 23-day imprisonment in an underground
jail in Beijing. Speaking to the Guardian at his new home in northern Thailand,
Dahlin claimed that after being detained by state security agents in January
2016 he was deprived of sleep and forced to endure exhausting late-night
interrogation sessions; denied the right to exercise, sunlight and access to
his embassy; and questioned using lie-detection equipment with the Orwellian
name of a “communication enhancement machine”. “These facilities are built to
break you,” Dahlin said of the covert centre where he was held under 24-hour
guard in a padded cell.
In a series of
interviews with his lawyers at the start of this year, Xie, whose Chinese
nationality appears to have exposed him to far more brutal treatment than
Dahlin, described a range of physical and mental abuse. After being picked up
by security agents on 11 July, he said he was taken to a police station,
chained up and questioned about his involvement in an “anti-party and
anti-socialist” group of lawyers.
The next day he was
moved to a secret interrogation facility inside a guesthouse in the state
capital, Changsha, where the alleged torture began. Xie claimed he was forced
to sit in stress positions on a stack of plastic chairs in which it was
impossible for his feet to touch the floor. “I had to sit there for more than
20 hours, both legs dangling in such pain until they began numb,” he recounted.
Traditional beatings were also allegedly doled out. “They’d split up the work:
one or two would grab my arms while someone used their fists to punch me in the
stomach, kneed me in the stomach, or kicked me with their feet,” Xie claimed,
according to a
translation of his testimonypublished on China Change, a human rights
website.
“This is a case of
counterrevolution! Do you think the Communist party will let you go?” he quoted
one of his captors as saying. “I could torture you to death and no one could
help you.” Xie, who remains in custody, claimed agents also issued thinly
veiled threats against his family and friends. “Your wife and children need to
pay attention to traffic safety when they’re out in the car. There are a lot of
traffic accidents these days,” one agent reputedly told him.
Chinese authorities
have not responded to Xie’s allegations and security officials rarely address such
claims. But in a recent editorial, Xinhua, Beijing’s official news agency,
rejected criticism of China’s current human rights situation, which some
observers describe as the
worst since the days following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. “Certain
western countries, while turning a blind eye to their own deep-rooted human
rights issues, such as rampant gun crime, refugee crises and growing
xenophobia, have a double standard on human rights, alongside a sense of
superiority,” Xinhua said.
Terry Halliday, an
American Bar Foundation scholar who recently published a book about
China’s human rights lawyers, said the abuse described by Xie was now “par
for the course” for those deemed enemies of the Chinese Communist party. “It
all rings true,” he said. “Nothing would surprise me about the degree to which
the authorities will go in order to get the kind of response they want. “It seems to me that
part of the evil genius of the Chinese security apparatus has been that they
have perfected forms of enormous pressure on individuals that are so powerful
that they can compel almost any individual to comply, but yet they are not so
manifest with broken bones, or the shedding of blood or external marks that can
be used by the media or advocates around the world to criticise the government
for inhumane treatment,” Halliday added.
“It’s torture behind a
veil. We are left in the position of having to believe or not the person
describing what happened to them, with very little evidence externally that
allows us to validate that.” Halliday said one case where there did appear to
be clear and dramatic proof of abuse was that of Li Chunfu, another attorney
who was seized during the crackdown and recently emerged from 500 days of
secret detention.
Li, whose brother, Li
Heping, was one of the operation’s best-known targets, was taken on 1
August 2015 during the initial wave of arrests of lawyers and activists. He
returned home on 12 January after being granted bail. But relatives claim
nearly 17 months of severe abuse have transformed the 44-year-old lawyer into a
shadow of his former self. “His mind is shattered,” his wife, Bi Liping, is
quoted as saying in one
online account of the lawyer’s ordeal. A local hospital offered a
preliminary diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Halliday said that in
meetings Li Chunfu had always struck him as “a very poised, very articulate,
sophisticated person”. In photographs taken following his release he was
unrecognisable. “He looked like a different man; someone a generation older.
Five hundred days of total isolation. Who can withstand that?” Xie Yang
admitted that he, for one, had not been able to withstand it. Speaking to his
lawyers, he claimed he had suffered a “complete mental breakdown” and, facing a
barrage of violence and threats, had caved in. “I wanted to be done with the
interrogations as quickly as possible … so whatever they wanted me to write, I
wrote,” he said. “I told them to type something up and I’d sign it, no matter
what it said … I didn’t want to go on living.”
