Repression in China at worst level since Tiananmen Square, HRW warns

In annual report, Human Rights Watch highlights situation under President Xi Jinping as one of biggest global setbacks to human rights in 2018

China’s assault on individual human rights is at its worst level since the Tiananmen Square massacre, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in an annual report that named the country among its top concerns.

In its World Report 2019, HRW singled out the actions of President Xi Jinping’s government as among the biggest setbacks of the past year, though it concluded that globally there were signs of hope in movements against autocratic rule.

Kenneth Roth, the New York-based organisation’s executive director, wrote in his letter prefacing the report that China had increased the severity of human rights repression to “the worst since the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement of 1989”.

Elsewhere, the report found that:

• In Pakistan, authorities have muzzled dissenting voices of activists and journalists while failing to protect the country’s religious minorities, instead pandering to extremist groups.
• In Afghanistan, civilians are bearing the brunt of widening armed conflict, with more than 10,000 non-combatants killed or injured during the past year – one third of them children.
• In central Asian nations such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, dissenting voices faced extreme levels of repression even as countries tried to open up to new international economic investment.

On China, Mr Roth drew attention to the rollout of mass surveillance techniques such as face recognition software, the ending of presidential term limits by Xi Jinping and, most critically, the persecution of more than a million Uighur Muslims in “re-education” camps in the country’s northwest Xinjiang region.

China has rejected all accusations of systematic abuse towards Muslims, saying its campaign is necessary to root out extremism. Having previously denied the existence of the Xinjiang camps, in October it opened them up to state broadcaster CCTV for a 15-minute segment showing how inmates receive “free vocational training” at the facilities.

Human rights defenders in China are subject to “arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and enforced disappearance”, according to the report. And, through its “Belt and Road” programme of international infrastructure projects, China “fostered autocratic mismanagement in other countries”, Mr Roth said.

“This year it became clear that [Xi] is detaining 1 million Uyghur Muslims for so-called re-education, which basically means forcing them to renounce Islam and to renounce their ethnicity,” he said.

Mr Roth said if any other country was doing this “it would be an outrage, but China, because of its economic clout, has been getting away with it”.

Muslims in Xinjiang, even if not formally detained, suffer “extraordinary restrictions on personal life”, the report said.

“Authorities have recalled passports throughout the region, and to travel from one town or another, people have to apply for permission and go through checkpoints,” it read. “They are subjected to persistent political indoctrination, including compulsory flag-raising ceremonies and political or denunciation meetings.

“With unprecedented levels of control over religious practices, authorities have effectively outlawed the practice of Islam in the region.”

Human Rights Watch noted the fact that the #MeToo movement in support of women’s rights also took hold in China, as accusations of sexual misconduct were levied against prominent academics, journalists, and activists.

Nonetheless, the outrage which might have followed was subdued by censors, particularly when claims were made against a prominent presenter of a state TV channel, according to the report. The Chinese government, it noted, generally “remains hostile to women’s rights activism”.

“You would be hard pressed to find a government that could rival Xi Jinping’s for the threat it presents to human rights, both inside and outside China,” Sophie Richardson, director of Human Rights Watch’s China programme, told The Independent.

She points to the case of Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, “a Canadian citizen handed a death sentence as a result of a diplomatic spat”, and warned that the international mechanisms of accountability for human rights abuses are “themselves deeply compromised by Chinese influence”.

Ms Richardson called on the UN Human Rights Council to take action, in the first instance by setting up a commission of enquiry to investigate the oppression of Muslims in Xinjiang.

“China presents an extraordinary threat, and we need the world and institutions like the UN to perceive and respond to that while they can,” she said. “Otherwise, in the absence of significant pressure on Xi, the [Communist] party and the government to change their ways, it is hard to see any of these trends reversing in the near term.”