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We warmly welcome yesterday’s U.S. State Department’s announcement of visa restrictions on PRC officials for their involvement in repressive acts against members of ethnic and religious minority groups and religious and spiritual practitioners inside and outside of China’s borders, including within the United States.
This announcement follows last week’s charges for brazen and wide-ranging schemes to stalk and harass Chinese dissidents in the United States, including by seeking to derail the election bid of a little-known congressional candidate, by the U.S. Justice Department against five men accused of acting on behalf of the Chinese government.
The actions by the U.S. Administration closely follow our denouncing of the CCP’s increasing transnational repression around the world, documented in our January 18 report Involuntary Returns, a campaign coordinated by de facto Party body the National Supervision Commission (NSC) through its operation Sky Net. Aimed at returning targets by any means necessary – including so-called irregular methods ranging from threats and harassment to straight-out kidnappings on foreign soil -, the operation has the secondary goal of silencing dissent towards the CCP by anyone anywhere.
These operations are a key part of Xi Jinping’s signature “anti-corruption” campaign, under which since the set-up in 2018 of the NSC as an appendix to the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection (CCDI) tens of thousands have been disappeared and tortured in the Liuzhi system.
The system, together with the widespread and systematic use against human rights defenders and dissidents of Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) documented in our graphic report Locked Up, has been repeatedly denounced by the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances.
These are but some of the industrial-scale human rights abuses taking place inside the People’s Republic of China every single day, while increasingly brazen methods are adopted to export this model of political terror around the globe. This poses a severe and immediate threat to the international rules-based order, national sovereignty, and fundamental human rights everywhere.
Together with other dedicated civil society organizations, we will therefore continue our efforts to make sure the U.S. State Department’s action to impose restrictions on PRC officials who are believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, policies or actions aimed at repressing religious and spiritual practitioners, members of ethnic minority groups, dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, labor organizers, civil society organizers, and peaceful protestors in China and beyond, does not remain an isolated act but is followed by other democratic nations and regions.
