China is among the foreign governments that retaliate against people for engaging with the United Nations, according to a report released this week by the U.N. Secretary-General.
The report highlights how hard Beijing tries to silence its critics, according to Sophie Richardson, an expert on human rights in China.
“These [U.N.] mechanisms are some of the only ones available to people inside China, at least on paper, to provide any modicum of redress or justice for the human rights abuses either they’ve endured or the communities they work with have endured,” Richardson told VOA.
“That’s why you see the Chinese government go to extraordinary lengths to silence people who are simply trying to take reports to some of these human rights experts or bodies,” Richardson said.
A former China director at Human Rights Watch, Richardson is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University.
The annual report chronicles government retaliation against people for engaging with the U.N. In addition to China, other countries named in the report include Colombia, India, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Russia.
“In my perfect world, governments that get referenced in these reprisals reports shouldn’t be members of the Human Rights Council,” said Richardson, who is based in Washington. China is a current member of the council in Geneva.
China’s U.N. offices in New York and Geneva did not reply to VOA’s emails requesting comment about the U.N. report.
One of the incidents included in the report’s China section is harassment against two members of the international legal team supporting Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy publisher.
Lai is on trial in Hong Kong on national security charges that are widely viewed as politically motivated. The 76-year-old is in prison following convictions in other cases that supporters also view as sham cases.
Members of Lai’s legal team have faced death and rape threats, as well as attempts by unknown sources to hack their email and bank accounts, according to the report.
Sebastien Lai thanked the U.N. for shedding light on his father’s case.
“These intimidation tactics will not succeed. I will not rest until my father is freed,” he said in a statement.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, a barrister leading Jimmy Lai’s international legal team, also condemned the attacks.
The reprisals “are personally unpleasant and distressing,” Gallagher said in a statement. “But they are also an attack on the legal profession and on the international human rights system.”
The reprisals make it harder for Jimmy Lai to use U.N. mechanisms to achieve justice in his case, Gallagher said.
Hong Kong’s government has tried to argue that the legal team interfered in Hong Kong’s judicial process by bringing his case to U.N. human rights mechanisms, according to the report.
“It’s just so nakedly in tension with its obligations under international law,” Richardson said.
On Thursday, Lai’s international legal team submitted an urgent appeal to the U.N. special rapporteur on torture. The appeal raised several concerns, including that the elderly publisher has been in solitary confinement since late 2020 and that the British national has been denied access to independent medical care, according to a statement from his legal team.
Lai’s trial began in December 2023. It was initially expected to last around 80 days but is now expected to resume in November.
Press freedom groups have called the trial a sham, and the U.S. and British governments have called for his immediate release. Hong Kong officials, however, have said he will receive a fair trial.
Following this article’s publication, China’s Washington embassy replied to VOA’s request for comment, alleging, without evidence, that Lai had tried to destabilize Hong Kong. Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson, added that China has “found a path toward better human rights that reflects the trend of the times and fits our national realities.”
Gallagher, who leads Lai’s international legal team, told VOA that the embassy’s statement was “astonishing” and shows that Lai’s trial is unfair. “For the authorities to say Jimmy Lai is a notorious criminal, an anti-China element, at a time when, apparently, he’s having a trial with the presumption of innocence just shows there’s no rule of law,” she said.
Other incidents cited in the U.N. report include the case of Cao Shunli, a Beijing-based human rights defender who was arrested following an attempt to engage in a universal periodic review of China’s human rights record at the Human Rights Council. Cao died in custody in 2014.
Another case is that of the Beijing-based activists Li Wenzu and Wang Quanzhang, who are married. The couple have faced significant retaliation, including police surveillance and evictions, and their son is unable to enroll in school due to pressure from state authorities, the report said.
“If one reads these cases, you get a sense of what risks — what unbelievable risks — people are taking to do this kind of work,” Richardson said.
The report doesn’t mention specific incidents involving Uyghurs or Tibetans, but Richardson says their absence underscores how difficult it is for some groups to access U.N. mechanisms in the first place, as well as how some people may be too scared to report such incidents to the U.N.
The Chinese government has engaged in severe human rights abuses against both ethnic groups, according to myriad reports. Multiple governments and international human rights organizations have accused Beijing of committing genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs, which the Chinese government rejects.
