COVID-19 fuels human rights violations in China

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) warns that the COVID-19 crisis comes with a significant increase in human rights violations in China. According to the human rights organization, more than 900 cases of disappearances, arrests, detentions, imprisonment in camps, forced "confessions", and fines have been registered since January 2020, as a consequence of the coronavirus crisis. "We see brainwashing as well as restrictions on the freedom of religion and the freedom of the press – under the pretext of fighting the pandemic," warned Ulrich Delius, the STP's Director, in Göttingen on Sunday. For example, movement data collected in the fight against COVID-19 is also used to track down and arrest believers of the persecuted Christian Church of Almighty God. In schools and universities, digital teaching is used to indoctrinate against alleged "western values" such as human rights or religious freedom.

The human rights organization is particularly concerned that China's authorities are using the pandemic to silence human rights advocates and democracy activists who have been persecuted for years. Thus, Guo Quan was once again arrested in February 2020. The former professor of Nanjing University had been released from prison in 2018 after having served a ten-year prison sentence. The democracy activist had been sentenced for allegedly "endangering state order" after calling for a democratization of the People's Republic in an open letter to the leadership of the Communist Party. Now, he was arrested for "endangering state order" once again, because he reported on the COVID-19 crisis in online media. The STP has been campaigning for Guo Quan for years as he was a university professor in Göttingen's twin city Nanjing until his arrest.

As the Chinese Ministry of Public Security stated on February 21, 2020, the authorities have so far investigated 5,111 cases of people spreading "false rumors" about COVID-19. Many people in Tibet and Xinjiang/East Turkestan were arrested, and several websites were blocked.

According to the human rights organization, members of the Church of Almighty God are especially affected by the new wave of persecution. For example, facial recognition software and the systematic recording of movement profiles have led to the arrest of more than one hundred members of the religious community in the provinces of Shandong, Sichuan, and Fujian since January 2020. They are now facing prison sentences. More than 6,100 members of the banned religious community were arrested in 2019, and about 1,300 of them were sentenced to prison terms.

Header image: Lei Han via Flickr.