MCLC: detained to death

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: detained to death
***********************************************************

Source: NY Review of Books (5/15/14):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/15/china-detained-to-death/

China: Detained to Death
By Renee Xia and Perry Link

On May 3, fifteen Beijing citizens—scholars, journalists, and rights
lawyers—gathered informally at the home of Professor Hao Jian of the
Beijing Film Academy to reflect on the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the
1989 June Fourth massacre in Beijing. Two days later, five of the
participants were arrested and charged with “creating a disturbance in a
public place, causing serious disorder.” All five remain in detention.

Two of the five people have serious medical conditions: philosophy
professor Xu Youyu, sixty-seven, has high blood pressure and diabetes;
human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, forty-nine, suffers both these conditions
plus high cholesterol. Both take daily medications, but officials
confiscated their medicines when they arrived at the detention facility,
saying that detention-center staff are in charge of all medications. The
next day both men were offered pills that they did not recognize. Xu was
afraid of ingesting them and declined. Pu reluctantly accepted them.

While the detention of activists by the Chinese government is well known,
there is relatively little discussion about medical treatment in detention
facilities. But to anyone who thinks the concerns of Xu and Pu about their
medications might be excessive, it is crucial to understand what happened
to Cao Shunli, a legal rights activist who had a chronic medical
condition. She died on March 14, at age fifty-one, as a result of medical
complications that became life-threatening during five months of criminal
detention. Like Xu and Pu, she had been charged with “creating a
disturbance”—in her case for trying to board a flight to Geneva to speak
to UN officials about abuses in Chinese labor camps and prisons.

When Cao was detained on September 14, 2013, she was healthy, although she
had a liver condition that she was managing with medication. After she was
put in a detention facility at a secret location and deprived of her usual
medication, however, her liver condition dramatically worsened and her
abdomen swelled; then she contracted tuberculosis and developed uterine
cysts as well. When her lawyer Wang Yu saw her on October 30 it was the
first time any friend or family member had seen Cao since she
“disappeared” six weeks earlier. Wang reported to Cao’s family and friends
that she looked frail and immediately submitted an application for release
from detention on medical grounds. The authorities, who were preparing a
criminal case against Cao, rejected the request. Over the next few months,
Wang made several more applications for medical bail, but was refused each
time.

On February 17, 2014, after Cao’s health sharply deteriorated, Chinese
authorities ordered her transfer to an emergency room and then to the
Beijing 309 Military Hospital. Two days later they notified the family of
the move. On February 27, after Cao had fallen into a coma, the
authorities now rushed to release her and forced Cao’s family to sign a
document acknowledging they had done so. The apparent purpose of this
last-minute paperwork was to disavow official responsibility in case Cao
died. Fifteen days later, she died.

Cao’s experience, horrific in itself, is all the more disturbing because
it follows a pattern that has emerged in a number of other cases. In 2006,
a petitioner named Duan Huimin was beaten severely by police and sent to a
detention center, where he never received any medical treatment. After
fifty-seven days in detention, he was sent home—unconscious. He died
<http://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post_19.html> two days later. In
2007, Chen Xiaoming, a leading petitioner-activist in Shanghai, also died
<http://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2013/07/6.html> two days after being released
from detention. Chen had been jailed, tortured almost to death, and then
denied medicine. And on March 19 of this year, four days after Cao
Shunli’s death, Tibetan political prisoner Goshul Lobsang, who was
forty-three, died at his home in Gansu Province, from complications of
mistreatment in detention. He had been serving a twelve-year sentence for
allegedly leading a protest in 2008, and following torture and deprivation
of medical treatment, the authorities released him on medical grounds last
fall. At the time of his death, he had become unable to speak, eat, walk,
or drink.

It is well established <http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/china02/> that
China’s authorities, from the late Mao years to the present, have punished
critics 
<http://www.chrdnet.com/2012/08/the-darkest-corners-abuses-of-involuntary-p
sychiatric-commitment-in-china/> by sending them to insane asylums. Now,
Cao’s death, and the circumstances of Pu’s and Xu’s detention, raise the
question of whether Chinese authorities are deliberately withholding
medicine from political detainees as another way to punish them and
intimidate their followers. Among well-known opponents of the government,
AIDS activist Hu Jia (imprisoned 2007–2011), poet Zhu Yufu (imprisoned
1999–2007 and 2011–present), and Mongolian nationalist Hada (in prison
since 1995) have, like Cao Shunli, all been denied medical parole while
suffering serious illnesses in detention. And there are numerous cases
involving people who are less known.

Clearly, however, prison authorities need to be careful about withholding
medical care. Just as the regime needs to be careful when it stokes
anti-Japanese sentiment—at a certain point applying the brakes lest
Chinese “patriotism” go too far and turn against the Chinese government
itself, for its alleged weakness—so the withholding of medical care in
prisons can go too far if it actually leads to death. Such deaths in
detention have sometimes drawn international scrutiny; the UN Committee
Against Torture asked the Chinese government in 2008 to explain the
growing number of such incidents. As a result, there seems to be an
increasing practice of releasing detainees with medical conditions once
they are on the verge of death.

Even when detainees die after their release, however, it is bad press for
the Chinese government, especially in cases, like Cao Shunli’s, that get
international notice. Since her death, Cao has been named one of three
finalists for the 2014 Martin Ennals Award, an international human rights
prize to be awarded in the fall and that is calling attention both to her
work and the terrible circumstances of her death. For the authorities,
this dilemma—how much to torture people on the one hand, and at what point
to pull back on the other—concerns the question of how best to serve state
power. The two have to be balanced.

If there is indeed a state policy on deprivation of medical treatment, it
is unlikely that it is written down anywhere. The most sensitive
instructions in police and censorship work in the PRC are often done
orally or by tacit understanding. There are, however, two good reasons for
believing such practices come from the top and are not just abuses by
local officials. One is that the pattern of denying certain prisoners
medicines or access to treatment seems to be consistent nationwide. The
other is that there is much evidence that low-ranking people in the police
system are not abusive toward rights activists unless instructed to be.
Many veterans of detention have reported that low-level workers in the
police system say “I am just doing my job, please understand,” and
sometimes even discreetly express sympathy.

The particular “disturbance” that led to Cao’s detention, and then to her
death, is further evidence that the regime’s concern for its own power is
its highest priority. A legal scholar who studied at Peking University,
Cao will someday be in China’s history books for her courageous,
persistent defense of Chinese “petitioners,” the common people who travel
to the capital to entreat authorities to address injustices they have
suffered in the provinces. But what led to her final detention were her
efforts in recent years to promote transparent reporting of human rights
conditions in China to the international community.

In late 2008, China was preparing to undergo its first human rights review
by the United Nations, a so-called “Universal Period Review” in which the
government in question is asked to provide information to the UN after
“broad consultation with civil society.” Cao had already
tried—repeatedly—to offer her findings to the Chinese government. Since it
was now a UN request that civil society be consulted, she initially
thought that she might be helping the government.

The authorities, though, refused her materials, which documented hundreds
of individual cases of rights abuses. The government’s subsequent report
to the UN did not refer to any materials from any genuinely
non-governmental source, yet claimed that “broad public consultations were
conducted via the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” No one had
watched that ministry website closer than Cao, and she knew that her
government had told the UN a flat lie. Incensed, she organized a public
rally in Beijing on April 12, 2009. Eight days later she was sentenced to
a year in a labor camp for creating a public disturbance.

At the camp, Cao refused to admit wrongdoing and began protesting the
abuses she witnessed by telling camp authorities that they were violating
the law. Her efforts led to retribution, and she was subjected to torture,
including, at one point, five days of no food followed by three days of
force-feeding through a nasal tube.

She was released from the camp in April 2010—as it happened, right at the
moment when authorities were busy locking up activists in order to prevent
trouble at the upcoming Shanghai World Expo. Two weeks later, after
protesting her earlier detention and taking part in a small demonstration,
she was back at the labor camp for another fifteen months.

Released again in July 2011, she turned her attention to the “Human Rights
Action Plan” that the Chinese government was then working on. This was
another document it was preparing for the UN review and claiming to be
representative of views from civil society. Cao and some colleagues again
offered information on rights conditions for petitioners and in labor
camps, but again, when the report appeared in June 2012, it bore no sign
of any input from any non-governmental source.

Using a law called the Government Information Disclosure Act, Cao filed a
request, co-signed by about a hundred petitioners, to disclose how the
Action Plan had actually been drafted. The request was not answered, but
in the following days many of the petitioners who had co-signed it were
seized and sent back to their hometowns. Two of Cao’s colleagues who had
helped with it were criminally detained.

Still undeterred, Cao focused next on China’s second UN Periodic Review,
which was scheduled to take place in October 2013 in Geneva. In June 2012,
she submitted to the State Council another Information Disclosure request,
this time asking how the review was going to be done. In November a reply
came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the UN review involves
China’s diplomacy and is therefore a “state secret.” By now too
experienced to be stunned by an absurd answer, she continued through
winter and spring of 2013 to demand that the authorities consider the
information that her group had collected.

In January 2013, we met Cao at a human rights workshop in Asia. She was
energetic, optimistic, and determined. If the Chinese authorities would
not tell the truth to the UN, she would go to Geneva herself, she said. In
April, she and her colleagues filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs challenging its claim that its methods of consulting with
civil society are a state secret. By June they had no answer, so they
organized a sit-in at the ministry to demand one. The sit-in lasted almost
three months, sometimes drawing as many as two hundred participants.

In August, a Beijing court rejected the lawsuit, ruling that UN reviews do
indeed involve “diplomatic actions” that cannot be subjected to citizens’
lawsuits. At that point Cao became more determined than ever to go to
Geneva—a decision that crossed what would be a fatal line with
authorities. The regime could play cat-and-mouse with her at home,
bullying as necessary, but if she spoke to the outside world, she would be
harming its vital interests.

Ever since the June Fourth massacre in 1989, China’s authorities have
faced challenges from the international community about their human rights
record. Initially—and especially in addresses to the Chinese people
themselves—the argument of government officials was that human rights are
“Western values” that come from different cultural roots and “do not
accord with China’s conditions.” Human rights are not needed in China. In
recent years, though, there has been a clear change of strategy,
especially in dealings with the UN. Now the government’s pitch is that
China champions human rights and is even a standard-bearer for them, while
China’s state media instead takes every opportunity to discuss alleged
rights violations by the US and other Western countries. Using diplomatic
pressure and financial incentives, the Chinese government has campaigned
successfully to get itself elected, and twice re-elected, to the UN Human
Rights Council.

But there is an obvious danger for the government in this strategy: the
Great Secret of what actually happens inside China must be kept sealed
inside. This is why independent voices from China’s civil society must not
be heard at the UN. And it is why Cao Shunli risked her life when,
finally, she would not accept that fact. Indeed, Pu Zhiqiang and other
scholars were arrested even for talking about the memory of June Fourth in
private—the authorities seem to fear that their gathering could send a
message to others on the eve of the anniversary. Can we expect anything
different from a leadership for whom maintenance of authoritarian power is
the top priority? Is human rights “reform” possible under such a regime?
We doubt it.

Pu Zhiqiang and Cao Shunli have both been galling to the Chinese
government not just as inveterate defenders of underdogs but because they
have done so by standing up for China’s own laws and strictly following
the rules the government itself claims to uphold. This leaves no
legitimate grounds for silencing them. In the end, though, both may have
underestimated how far the regime will go to protect its vital interests.
The fate of Pu Zhiqiang, whose given name in Chinese means “strongly
determined,” remains uncertain; Cao’s no longer is. Her given name,
Shunli, means “all goes smoothly,” but life had a different script for her.