Human Rights Group: CCP to Detain Over 1M People

The Spain Madrid-based international human rights organization Safeguard Defenders released a new report on September 6th, revealing that in recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have abused house arrest to long-monitor dissents’ actions through “residential surveillance” at designated locations. It is a form of detention regularly used against individuals accused of endangering state security, resulting in the number of detainees surging to a range between 560,000 and 860,000. In the next three years, the figure will likely exceed one million, with no guarantee of human rights for these detainees.

 According to the report, after the CCP amended the Criminal Procedure Law in 2012 and 2018, adding the use of house arrest, the “residential surveillance” provision has been widely abused. On the website of China Judgments Online, the term “residential surveillance” is mentioned more than 270,000 times, and the number of unrecorded house arrests is at least three times that of the registered cases in the database. According to CCP’s official data, during the CCP virus pandemic in 2020, residential surveillance cases increased by 13% to 40,184 from 35,509 in 2019.

 Additionally, whenever the CCP holds important conferences or events, dissidents often experience “forcible travel,” a phrase meaning to be transferred by police to other cities for house imprisonment. Meanwhile, the CCP authorities have also taken illegitimate measures to restrict the freedom of family members of dissidents at various levels, and multiple departments have the authority to place them under house arrest.

 In some experts’ views, the hazard of abusing “residential surveillance at a designated location” is far harsher than arrests in detention centers. One reason is that the detainees, who are held in solitary confinement, are not subject to judicial oversight, and they are not allowed to hire lawyers without the approval from the case handling authorities. The police can even keep the victims in solitary confinement for up to six months.