Reality check on extradition with China

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights worker, had a chance to learn personally about the law in China. When the authorities decided to investigate him and China Action, the legal-aid committee he helped found in Beijing, he discovered what it’s like to displease the Chinese authorities. China Action was a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to supporting civil liberties but Dahlin was treated as an enemy of the state.

The police surrounded his Beijing home late one night in 2016 and arrested him and his Chinese girlfriend, Pan Jinling. He spent three weeks in a “secret prison,” blindfolded much of the time, deprived of sleep and remorselessly interrogated, often for six hours straight.

He was in a “black jail,” one of many in China where the police can hold prisoners in private, without reporting what they are doing. In Dahlin’s case the interrogation usually concerned Chinese rights lawyers that his organization worked with, as well as foreign sources of funding. Two guards watched Dahlin 24 hours a day, recording everything he did, but never uttered a word.

It was clear the police wanted to believe that China Action was a foreign agency, part of a scheme to overthrow the Chinese government. It did receive modest grants from the European Union, the National Endowment For Democracy and the Norwegian Human Rights Fund — but surely not enough to encourage paranoid fears of foreign domination.

Dahlin was kept for three weeks, then deported under the Espionage Law, sent on his way with no documentation of his arrest. Nothing about his detention, the search of his house and personal objects, not even a word about being banned from entering China for the next 10 years. On the paper record, nothing happened.

When four cops escorted him to the airport and sent him home to Scandinavia, he found that his plane ticket was first class. The police paid for it with cash they seized when they searched his place. Often, it appears, Chinese law works in private, and sometimes with a sense of humour.

Since Xi Jinping became president in 2012, rightsrelated activities in China have been subjected to increasingly stern scrutiny. The government is obsessed with restraints and repression. A UN committee says torture is a deeply entrenched feature of the Chinese system. Human Rights Watch reports that torture is still “routine” in Chinese jails.

Stein Ringen, a Norwegian sociologist whose recent book is called The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century, believes that the government has been sharply narrowing the freedoms of the Chinese now that the era of swift economic growth is over. In a few years, as Ringen sees it, Xi has turned the country into a “controlocracy.” He has handled the change in a way that illustrates a talent for public relations.

Ringen says the world has failed to grasp the scale of this development. China is seen by many foreigners as a “benevolent autocracy” when, according to Ringen, it’s turned into “a very, very hard dictatorship which manages to look better than it is.” It is so smooth, he says, “that in some respects it doesn’t even look dictatorial.”

Perhaps this explains why elements in the Canadian government have been thinking about signing an extradition treaty with China. We would have to close our eyes to China’s dreadful human rights record in order to endorse such an agreement. Extradition requires trust. Two nations must believe in the legal systems of each other. The systems may be somewhat different but only somewhat. Canada must be assured that its co-signer has judges firmly independent of the state, a justice system that strives for fairness, and an agreement that accused persons are innocent till proved guilty. In the China of today, no such system exists.

On Tuesday the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was forced to retract an extradition treaty he had negotiated with China. Politicians, including members of Turnbull’s Liberal Party, had decided that China’s shamefully unjust legal system made it an unthinkable partner in extradition. It was clear the law would not pass the senate. Tony Abbott, Turnbull’s predecessor, said that “China’s legal system has to evolve further before the Australian government and people could be confident that those before it would receive justice according to law.”

Last week China’s new ambassador to Canada, Lu Shaye, gave an insufferably arrogant interview about trade relations with Canada. A free-trade treaty between our two countries is being discussed and Lu wants us to know what China expects. It wants everything.

China wants unfettered access to all sectors of Canada and the right to buy and sell with the federal government. And Lu doesn’t want to hear anything about human rights in free-trade talks. If human rights are raised by Canada, that (Shaye says) would constitute trade-protectionism. The pomposity of this one diplomat suggests how China would behave in implementing an extradition treaty. That alone should kill the idea.

ROBERT FULFORD