The amended law says residential surveillance shouldn’t exceed six months but requires detainees’ families be notified within 24 hours, unless they can’t be reached, and guarantees all suspects the right to a lawyer, with whom a meeting should be granted within 48 hours of a request.
Critics of the new system and former detainees say it gives arbitrary detention a legal gloss and normalizes enforced disappearances. Earlier this year,
11 countries called on China to end the practice and investigate reports of torture against human rights lawyers.
The UN High Commission on Human Rights has also called on China to halt the detention of lawyers.
Although they were held at opposite ends of the country, Sui, Chen and Dahlin all describe similar conditions: Sparsely furnished rooms with black-out curtains on the windows and fluorescent lights kept on 24-hours a day.
They say they slept on a single bed, and were not allowed any reading or writing materials. Guards were always in the room watching their every move, even when they used the bathroom.
“There’s nothing to look at except some very beige-looking suicide padding on the wall,” said Dahlin.
He described being so bored he almost looked forward to the daily interrogations, “because at least you’re taken out to another room … and have some kind of interaction with people.”
The interrogators used methods which Dahlin said reminded him of “bad American movies.”
“They would have lots of people rush into your cell at night surrounding your bed just trying to scare you,” he said.
Chen, a professor who advocated for a US-style jury system in China on his blog, was first accused of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” — a vague charge often used by Chinese authorities that can carry a 10-year prison sentence. He told CNN he refused to admit any wrongdoing during a 20-hour interrogation, but then found himself sharing a jail cell with inmates accused of crimes ranging from petty theft to murder.
“The cell was so crammed I had to ask other prisoners to make room so I could urinate and defecate,” he said. “I didn’t have a spoon or chopsticks to eat with. We’d get one scoop of rice and would have to eat it with our hands.”
After a month, Chen said he was told to collect his belongings. He thought he was going home — but instead was driven to what appeared to be an abandoned hotel and held for another 10 days.
Earlier this year, CNN visited the nondescript building where Chen said he was held in Guilin, a southern city famed for its stunning landscape of karst mountains. Signs posted around the area in Chinese and English marked it as military property, but it otherwise appeared open and accessible.
Local officials denied that the building was used as a secret detention center.
‘You have to confess’
The rights activists held captive weren’t just concerned about their own well being. They say their loved ones were also threatened.
Dahlin’s interrogators made it clear that they’d keep his girlfriend, a Chinese national, in custody for as long as it took to resolve his case.
“She was taken hostage just to put pressure on me,” he said. Dahlin asked about his girlfriend every day but got limited answers.
“They said she was being treated quite well. That she was being given yoghurt and fruit and things like that. She was allowed to make a few drawings and do yoga in her room,” he said. “They knew she had nothing to give them.”
Finally, after more than three weeks, Dahlin was told he was going to be released — but he had to do one thing:
confess on camera.
He said he knew what authorities were really going to do with it. But wanting to speed up his release — and that of his girlfriend — Dahlin agreed to play his part.
He was taken into a room where a woman from state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) was sitting with a cameraman. Dahlin was handed a piece of paper with the questions that she would ask and the answers he would give.
“I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I apologize sincerely for this,” Dahlin said in the confession broadcast nationwide and splashed across state-run newspapers.
Immediately after its broadcast activists denounced it as a forced confession — one of many that have been shown on CCTV in the years since Xi came to power.
Sui and Chen said they had to make similar “confessions.” All three men now maintain their innocence, but they said they had no choice but to do as authorities wanted.
Sui says he admitted to charges of inciting subversion. Chen told CNN he confessed to charges of picking quarrels and provoking troubles, inciting subversion and embezzlement.
“You have to confess,” Chen said. “Otherwise they won’t let you go.”