According to a report just published by the NGO Safeguard Defenders, Chinese police and government agents continue to send activists and opponents to psychiatric wards for medically unnecessary compulsory treatment, where some “languish for years ”.
A report that only confirms the “tip of the iceberg” of a major problem
The report published by the NGO Safeguard Defenders, based in Madrid, lists at least a hundred victims, but it fears that the phenomenon is much larger. Based on interviews with victims and their families, the report reports that 99 people were locked up in psychiatric wards 144 times over seven years, from 2015 to 2021, in 109 hospitals in 21 provinces, municipalities or regions of China. Countless other cases would have gone unreported by NGOs and the media, especially in the climate of fear under Xi Jinping, who has increasingly closed China to the outside world. These figures indicate that the sending of political prisoners to psychiatric wards is rather widespread and routine.
International pressure without result
Due to intense international and domestic criticism, Beijing said it passed between 2012 and 2013 a new mental health law to require compulsory treatment to be approved by medical evaluation and revised its criminal procedure law to give control judiciary to psychiatric confinement imposed by the police. However, according to the report, these reforms have not prevented law enforcement from arbitrarily sending activists, sometimes repeatedly, to psychiatric confinement. Although written into the law, the control of these procedures is non-existent.
Human rights defenders denounce forced organ harvesting
This is not the only Chinese abuse denounced by the international community. For almost twenty years, lawyers, associations and human rights defenders have also denounced the fact that opponents imprisoned for their political opinions are killed so that their organs can then be removed. In June 2021, UN human rights experts said this “organ harvesting” targeted minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians, in detention in the country.