Forthcoming reports and exposés

Despite 2021 being filled with cutting-edge research reports, extensive evidence submissions to UN organs and governments, and a series of investigations and briefings, 2022 is set to further develop Safeguard Defenders' research output. As always, our research and ability to quickly identify changes on the ground is directly tied to local staff, partners, and networks, without whom none of this would be possible. 

For 2022, Safeguard Defenders will further develop our reporting and campaigning on "China in the world" issues to ensure that the deterioration in human rights, the rule of law, legal safeguards, and due process does not spread outside the country's border.

Here are some of our future releases, many of which are imminent.

Involuntary returns - China's covert operation to force “fugitives” overseas back home - set for release on January 18, 2022, is the first-ever report on China's long-arm policing using Sky Net (and Fox Hunt) operations.

The report presents information on the 10,000 successful "returns" since Fox Hunt was launched in 2014, and uses nearly 100 cases to show how such returns are achieved, ranging from threats to family back in China, covert missions overseas by Chinese police, and extensive use of kidnappings.

Hide and Seek - China’s Extradition Problem / A manual on countering extradition to China - is a comprehensive study and manual on China's use of extraditions around the world, and the problem such poses to the rule of law and non-refoulement. 

The 150-page manual analyses China's use of extradition, the issues that courts' faces in deciding on them, and presents detailed analysis on the use of torture, fair trial, and enforced disappearances, and the history of China's use of diplomatic assurances, and what role they play in extraditions. It also presents detailed data on select extradition proceedings, and how courts' decided on them.

Pursued for Life - Hong Kong’s global hunt for fugitives, the National Security Law, and risk of INTERPOL misuse - is Safeguard Defenders' next brief investigation, part of our new Investigation and Briefing series. 

The investigation, out January 2022, in English and Traditional Chinese editions, looks at the ever more threatening language being used by the Hong Kong government and police force about using international mechanisms - including INTERPOL - to chase down "fugitives" who fled Hong Kong, with a focus on young lawmakers and protest leaders.

Peace and Hell - China's use of the police-run Ankang system for custodial psychiatric custody - Set for release in the first half of 2022, Peace and Hell examines the little-known practice of forcibly committing activists and petitioners into psychiatric hospitals run like prisons. These police-run hospitals known as Ankang, as well as general mental health hospitals that collude with public security, commit patients not on the basis of an independent psychiatric assessment, but simply as another form of arbitrary and extralegal detention.

The report uses a wealth of personal interviews and data on the system and analyses the practice through the prism of both local law and international human rights norms to provide an up-to-date and detailed picture of this horrifying system.

Trapping prey in the cage - China's expanding use of exit bans - exposes how the CCP increasingly, arbitrarily, and usually illegally uses exit bans as a tool to strengthen social control. Exit bans in China victimize activists, rights lawyers, family members of dissidents, businesspersons, foreigners, and ordinary people with reasons ranging from criminal, civil, and administrative cases to 'national security' concerns, which is the most focused in this report.

This investigation set for release in early 2022 reviews exit ban cases from Hu Jintao’s tenure to nowadays’ Xi Jinping era. Through online searching and interviews with exit bans’ victims and their associates, it exposes the deprivation of freedom of movement is much more common in recent years under the CCP’s stronger will to fight against political opponents and under the bureaucracy without the balance of power.

Covid19 in China - When Endemic Repression meets Pandemic - Building on public reports, interviews, and on-the-ground insights, this new report provides an overview of Covid19's impact on the human rights situation in the PRC.

Meeting an already ongoing expansion of "national security" crimes and crackdown on the remainders of organized civil society, the CCP seized the fight against the pandemic to further its totalitarian efforts. The disappearance, arrest and/or ousting of independent (citizen) journalists; the rapid deterioration of minimal judicial safeguards or the restrictions imposed on Hong Kong's civil society are among the most emblematic and, most likely, long-lasting effects of these compounding systems.