Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an international media freedom group, yesterday called for democratic countries to assert pressure on China to release Gui Minhai (桂民海), a China-born Swedish book publisher and writer based in Hong Kong, who had been sentenced to 10 years in jail for “illegally providing intelligence overseas.”
Gui disappeared in October 2015 when he was on vacation in Thailand, and reappeared in custody in China in a video in which he appears to give a forced confession, saying he was involved in a fatal driving incident and distributed unlicensed books.
He was sentenced to jail in 2020 on espionage charges.
Photo: Reuters
“By not acting strongly enough for Gui Minhai, the international community has allowed the Chinese regime to assume the right to kidnap people anywhere in the world, deny their right to consular protection and arbitrarily detain them with total impunity,” RSF East Asia Bureau head Cedric Alviani said.
“We call on democracies, especially the Swedish government, the EU member states and the European Commission to increase pressure on China and do everything in their power so the detained publisher is finally released,” RSF Sweden president Erik Halkjaer said.
Gui’s daughter, Angela, has not heard from him for the past four years, RSF said.
“The imprisonment of my father, which is illegal even according to the Chinese law, should terrify us all,” she said, according to an RSF statement. “Holding China accountable for its crimes requires matching words with actions.”
RSF said it has submitted his case to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
On Nov. 15, 2019, he was awarded the Tucholsky Prize by the Swedish chapter of PEN International, an association that defends freedom of speech worldwide.
RSF said Gui Minhai is one of five Hong Kong publishers who had been kidnapped in late 2015. Today marks the seventh year since he was kidnapped while on vacation in Thailand.
RSF said that he was released from prison in 2017, remaining under residential surveillance, but in 2018 was arrested on a train to Beijing while accompanied by two Swedish diplomats, and was apparently forced to renounce his Swedish citizenship.
China is the world’s largest captor of journalists, with at least 116 detained, RSF says on its Web site.
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