On 21 August, Safeguard Defenders filed a comprehensive report and review of China's newest system for Enforced Disappearances, Liuzhi, to nine relevant UN Special Procedures.
This post provides details from the Swedish Supreme Court’s verdict today ruling that Chinese fugitive Qiao Jianjun should not be extradited to China. The full verdict is only available in Swedish (available here). Read the Supreme Court’s summary in English here.
In a landmark case, Sweden’s Supreme Court on July 9 ruled against the extradition of one of China’s most sought after corruption suspects.
Qiao Jianjun, a Chinese Communist Party member and mid-level state official, is being pursued by Beijing under its Operation Fox Hunt program for returning fugitives from overseas. Qiao is suspected of embezzling funds back home.
Sweden held Qiao in detention for nearly a year, until the Supreme Court held a hearing on 18 June following which Qiao was freed, pending a decision.
China’s state TV has been responding vigorously behind the scenes to five complaints against it made between November 2018 and April 2019 by Safeguard Defenders and victims to UK broadcasting regulator Ofcom for airing forced confessions.
China did not kill Wang Quanzhang, as some feared, but they did their best to break him. Police kidnapped the human rights lawyer in summer 2015 as part of the 709 Crackdown against rights defenders.
With the detention and placement into ‘Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location’ (RSDL) of foreign citizens by China in several high-profile cases, such as Michael Kovrig, Michael Spavor and Yang Hengjun, it merits a closer look at the use of solitary confinement within China’s RSDL system, and if and if so why, it constitutes torture under international law, in particular the Convention Against Torture, one of the few key human rights treatises both signed and ratified by China.
Update (May): Former CCTV presenter Cui Yongyuan, who first brough attention to scandal at the Chinese Supreme Court, which led to Supreme Court Justice Wang Linqing's disapparance (later re-appearing in a forced TV confession on CCTV, before disappearing again), has offered a similar confession himself. Cui posted on his social media account a handwritten notice about how he trusts the official investigation team, and that he had been foolish to believe what judge Wang had told him.
On February 28, 2019, a complaint will be filed by Safeguard Defenders to the UK’s TV regulator Ofcom, concerning systematic violations of the UK’s rule concerning due impartiality and due accuracy in TV broadcasts (standards section five), calling on Ofcom to investigate the broadcast of known and provable lies and intentional distortions in newscasts. The full complaint uses eight different broadcasts by CCTV/CGTN to show the systematic nature of these violations.
This brief paper looks into how critics are effectively disappeared after arrest, while awaiting trial, by police’s use of falsenames for those placed into pre-trial detention, done by police sometimes with, sometimes without, the detention centers’ knowledge.
On 21 August, Safeguard Defenders filed a comprehensive report and review of China's newest system for Enforced Disappearances, Liuzhi, to nine relevant UN Special Procedures. 
China did not kill Wang Quanzhang, as some feared, but they did their best to break him. Police kidnapped the human rights lawyer in summer 2015 as part of the 709 Crackdown against rights defenders.