'My hair turned white': report lifts lid on China's forced confessions
China must stop airing
forced confessions from human rights activists, a campaign group has said in a
report that details how detainees are coerced into delivering scripted remarks. There have been at
least 45 forced televised confessions in China since 2013, according to the
report from Safeguard
Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. The group called on the
international community to put pressure on the Chinese government to end the
practice and recommended imposing sanctions on executives at China’s state
broadcaster, including asset freezes and travel bans.
Those coerced into
confessing describe being dressed by police and handed a script they are
required to memorise, and even being given directions on how to deliver certain
lines or cry on cue, the report says. One person described enduring seven hours
of recording for a television piece that ultimately amounted to several
minutes. Others reported police ordering retakes of confessions they were
unhappy with. Some occur in
jailhouse settings, with the accused wearing an orange prison vest and sometimes
seated behind bars, while others are made to look more neutral. The confessions
are almost always aired before a formal conviction, violating Chinese law
asserting a presumption of innocence. Chinese courts have a
conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions. Five of the 37
people described in the report who have confessed on Chinese television have
since publicly retracted their confessions.
Since Xi Jinping came
to power in 2012 there has been a wholesale crackdown on civil society and
dissent, leading to hundreds of arrests targeting human rights activists and
the lawyers that defend them. The practice of forced confessions was especially
prominent during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of political
upheaval during which “counter-revolutionaries” were paraded through the
streets and forced to confess to their alleged crimes.
“[The police]
threatened that if I did not cooperate with them they would sentence me to jail
time, I’d lose my job, my family would leave me and I’d lose my reputation for
the rest of my life,” said one person quoted in the report, identified only as
Li. “I was only 39 years old, my hair turned white with the enormous pressure
and torture of it all.” Peter Dahlin, a former
China-based NGO worker from Sweden, was
forced to say he had violated Chinese law in a televised confession in
2016. He said the purpose, especially when foreigners were involved, was to
shape the conversation from the beginning and preempt any international
criticism. “This goes to show
this is not done simply by police for murky propaganda purposes but directly by
the state as a part of foreign policy,” he said… read more:see also
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