China should not use the coronavirus as an excuse to silence human rights activists like Wang Quanzhang
- As often occurs in the ‘non-release release’ of China’s political prisoners, lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been confined in his old home after his release – ostensibly for quarantine – yet he remains under strict surveillance
Chinese and Americans have the same saying, “turn a vice into a virtue”. That’s exactly what China’s Communist Party is up to, seeking to conceal its repression of the country’s human rights lawyers.
As often occurs in the “non-release release” of China’s political prisoners, Wang was sent to his old home in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, ostensibly for quarantine but in police custody. This keeps him cut off from the world, except for calls to his wife. It is no ordinary quarantine.
Yet this excuse for further detention, which Wang’s wife decried as shameless, will expire on April 19. What will be the party’s next move then? Medical experts sometimes recommend an extra seven-day quarantine. That might be too brief for the party.
A longer-lasting solution may be to announce that Wang – who tested negative five times before leaving prison, according to his wife – has indeed finally tested positive for the novel coronavirus and must be hospitalised indefinitely. Some independent Chinese journalists have recently “disappeared” into supposed quarantine, after all.
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Alternatively, the party might try a more legalistic charade. Wang was sentenced not just to prison, but also to deprivation of political rights for five years after his imprisonment. The party might therefore claim he must continue to be separated from all his contacts and society for that period.
Such a manoeuvre, while more inscrutable to the public, would stretch the meaning of deprivation of political rights far beyond even the party’s broad applications of that punishment to date. We should not underestimate the party’s inventiveness in adapting the “non-release release” and customising coercion to individual circumstances.
The party’s immense security apparatus more easily confines urban “non-release release” victims like Wang Quanzhang and rights lawyer Zheng Enchong. Once, six policemen in an apartment building’s courtyard in Shanghai stopped me from visiting Zheng after his three years in prison. When asked about their legal authority, they merely repeated: “We are police.”
What is the party afraid that Wang might tell the media? His years of being tortured in incommunicado confinement by officers hoping to force a confession? Compelled medications, for illnesses he did not suffer from, that have markedly diminished both his mental and physical capacity?
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In the case of Wang – whose trial took place more than three years after he disappeared in 2015 – was that feared provision imposed, then extended, before the normal criminal process began? Do China’s police have that discretion? If the public had been allowed to see the court’s judgment after Wang’s secret trial, we might already know the answer. Also, why didn’t he exercise his right to appeal conviction? And what use were the lawyers forced upon him by the government?
Covid-19 has outlived its use as an excuse for repression. This time the world is watching, so the party faces a challenge to its ingenuity, or at least its brazenness.
Jerome A. Cohen, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a law professor at NYU and founder of its US-Asia Law Institute
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