The Chinese Police can detain dissidents for half a year without notifying family members or lawyers
Pablo m. TEN
Beijing
12/03/2018
Swedish activist Peter Dahlin, during his forced confession on Chinese television – ABC
In any country where the rule of law governs, The first thing the police do when they arrest a suspect is read them their rights and offer them a court-appointed lawyer and a call to their family.. Quite the opposite of what happens in China, where a disappearance of up to six months can begin for the detainee without contact with relatives or legal assistance.
Without even notifying judges or prosecutors, That half a year is the maximum time that the law allows a suspect to be confined under the so-called “Residential Surveillance in a Designated Location.”” (RSDL, in its acronym in English). From 2012, This euphemism hides a terrifying network of detention and interrogation centers that has swallowed up hundreds of dissidents., lawyers specialized in human rights and social activists.
One of them was the Swede Peter Dahlin, who ran the NGO China Action in Beijing to train lawyers and was detained 23 days in January 2016. “They took me to a secret prison, where I was watched 24 hours by two guards and they subjected me to interrogations for up to ten hours, that started at night to deprive me of sleep and break me psychologically”, explains Dahlin by phone from Thailand, where you live. Although they pressured his girlfriend with threats, what is china, so that he could testify against his collaborators and lawyers, Being a foreigner freed him from the mistreatment suffered by other detainees.
“I once heard one of my assistants being beaten up in another room.”, recalls Dahlin, who was forced to confess on state television CCTV that he had “broken the law, "damaged the Government and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.". “Everything was prepared, “We recorded it for hours and a police officer gave the journalist and me a paper with the questions and answers to read.”, reveals a method that the editor Gui Minhai has also suffered, another Swede who published books against the regime in Hong Kong.
For his forced confession, Dahlin has no regrets because “I had to free my girlfriend and I didn't incriminate anyone”. In your opinion, “These legal disappearances go against human rights and can leave many more victims than the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile”.
Thanks to your European passport, He was released and expelled from the country, but other Chinese dissidents have been missing for years. This is the case of lawyer Wang Quanzhang, captured in the massive raid in July 2015 against human rights lawyers. His case is reported in the book “The Popular Republic of the Disappeared”, where a dozen activists recount the abuses suffered during their arrest.
"They tortured me, "They threatened to kill me and that my family could suffer a traffic accident and they tied me for hours to a chair where they immobilized me until my muscles went numb and I couldn't stand the pain.", narra Xie Yang, Hunan lawyer 45 years. After six months in a secret interrogation center, in January 2016 He was formally accused of “inciting subversion.”” against the regime. A crime for which numerous dissidents and social activists are convicted, the missing of china.
