Human Rights: Is China likely to build a better world? (Hong Kong Economic Journal)
Hong Kong Economic Journal, July 10, 2017
Human Rights: Is China likely to build a better world?
“Within China, however, not everyone would agree that a better world was being built for them. Sunday [July 9] marked the second anniversary of the “709 crackdown” against human rights defenders, which began on July 9, 2015. According to China Change, an organization that works with Chinese democracy advocates, more than 300 human rights lawyers and activists have been detained, disappeared, temporarily rounded up and interrogated….These events have not gone unnoticed overseas. The New York City Bar Association also issued a statement marking the ‘709 Crackdown’ on Sunday. ‘In what amounts to nothing less than a “war on law” that is unprecedented in its scale and severity,’ the New York body said, ‘Chinese human rights lawyers and activists have been summoned for questioning, kidnapped by secret police, detained incommunicado in “black jails” and other prisons, humiliated and subjected to marathon interrogation sessions and other forms of sadistic psychological and physical torture, including sleep deprivation, forced medication (often with grave consequences for mental and physical health), brutal beatings, electric shocks, prolonged subversion in water, death threats, and months of solitary confinement.'”
Column also featured in The Globe and Mail and The Korea Times.
