China’s parallel justice system for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members relies heavily on torture and is “abusive and illegal,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said yesterday, calling for the network to be abolished.
About 88 million CCP members are subject to an internal justice system known as shuanggui (雙規), which operates without oversight from judicial authorities and has been increasingly criticized by China’s legal community.
More than 15 officials have reportedly died from abuses in shuanggui since 2007.
Since coming to power, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has presided over a much-publicized drive against corruption that has punished more than 1 million officials in what some say resembles a political purge.
Many are disappeared without warning and held in unofficial detention facilities until they “confess” to corruption, then brought into the criminal justice system and convicted.
“President Xi has built his anti-corruption campaign on an abusive and illegal detention system,” HRW China director Sophie Richardson said.
She called for its abolition as a “first urgent step” toward restoring confidence in China’s legal system.
“Political parties in a one-party state should not run their own detention systems,” she said.
A report released yesterday, based on analysis of court verdicts, media reports and interviews with former detainees and their family members, details the abuses of the system.
Typically, shuanggui subjects disappear without warning and are held in unofficial detention facilities until they “confess” to corruption. Then they are brought into the criminal justice system and convicted.
Tactics used to extract confessions include prolonged sleep deprivation, food and water deprivation, severe beatings, being forced into stress positions for extended periods of time and threats to family members, among others.
One former detainee detailed how he was forced to invent stories of his crimes: “They made me make it up. I had to make it up — if I didn’t they’d beat me.”
Another was made to stand and sit in alternating, endless 12 hour shifts, saying “my legs became swollen, and my buttocks were raw and started oozing pus.”
One Beijing-based lawyer described the case of a client who was given only an hour a sleep a day and was forced to spend the rest of his time balancing a book on his head.
After eight days, he “confessed to everything and to whatever they said,” the lawyer said. “At that point his feet were swollen like an elephant’s, and he could no longer urinate.”
Chinese courts have a conviction rate of 99.92 percent.
“The courts function as rubber stamps, lending credibility to an utterly illegal Communist Party process,” Richardson said.
“Shuanggui not only further undermines China’s judiciary — it makes a mockery of it,” she added.
In October, a key meeting of the CCP called for stricter control over its members, promising to strengthen internal curbs on their behavior.
Newly issued rules after the conclave further tighten ideological controls that have already increased dramatically under Xi.
They call on party members to oppose acts contrary to the CCP’s leadership and promising increased investigations into behavior that does not follow the party line.
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