cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59174859
Here is the full report: "Swept Under the Rug”: Systemic Failures to End Torture in the People’s Republic of China (pdf)
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"In cases involving human rights defenders, it is normal for Chinese authorities to employ torture to extract confessions, fabricate evidence, violate legal procedures, manufacture wrongful convictions, and subject individuals to criminal persecution." - Family member of currently imprisoned rights activist, April 20261
Beatings, electric shocks, solitary confinement: although the Chinese government signed the United Nations Convention against Torture forty years ago, and adopted some domestic prohibitions against these abuses, periodic reviews by international bodies and documentation from independent civil society demonstrate that torture by those authorities persists. Prisoners of conscience are at especially grave risk.
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“The Chinese government’s ongoing reliance on torture isn’t a function of gaps in law or process—it’s a political choice,” said Sophie Richardson, Co-Executive Director of CHRD. “When every safeguard against torture is ignored—year after year, nationwide—impunity for police, courts, and officials is all but guaranteed.”
One in five of the cases CHRD examined included allegations of beatings by authorities. Others reported being subjected to electric shocks and solitary confinement. 35 percent described deprivation of adequate medical care—the most common form of torture—and 16 died in detention as an apparent result. More than half of prisoners of conscience alleging torture had been imprisoned for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge United Nations human rights experts have called vague and imprecise; the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for it to be repealed.
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Chinese authorities torture and ill-treat prisoners of conscience with near-total impunity, the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders said today in a new report. Drawing on 209 cases of alleged torture between 2016 and 2025 across the country, and interviews with 25 human rights defenders (HRDs), family members, and lawyers, the 53-page report, “Swept Under the Rug”: Systemic Failures to End Torture in the People’s Republic of China, finds that authorities persist in their use of torture, typically to extract confessions, and fail to investigate allegations of ill-treatment.
CHRD found reference to courts conducting investigations into torture allegations in only two of the 209 cases, those of rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi and journalist Huang Xueqin. Those courts subsequently claimed they found no evidence of torture. In the case of HRD Ji Xiaolong, the court agreed to exclude his confession on the grounds it was obtained through ill-treatment—the only such exclusion CHRD found among the 209 cases—but convicted him anyway, stating that his lack of a confession made him a “recidivist” deserving harsher punishment.
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Despite having ratified the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1988, Chinese authorities have failed to engage reviews with the goal of eradicating torture. At China’s last review, in 2015, the Committee against Torture (CAT) concluded that these abuses remain “deeply entrenched.” The Chinese government delayed submitting its most recent periodic report for five years and as a result is significantly overdue for review by the committee, one of the few remaining avenues of redress for torture survivors. Chinese authorities are increasingly combative in rejecting international scrutiny, telling the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2021 that “the risk of being ‘subjected to torture’… does not exist” in China.
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“Chinese authorities have had four decades to make good on their promises to end torture,” Richardson said. “Must prisoners of conscience pay with their health—and, in some cases, their lives—for Beijing’s intransigence?”
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