China arbitrarily detained thousands and convicted 1,545 “prisoners of conscience” in the last six years in what could constitute "crimes against humanity", a rights group alleged.
The prisoners were jailed for "peacefully exercising or advocating for human rights", Chinese Human Rights Defenders said in a report on Wednesday.
It said the punishment for the those detained ranged from an average of six years, increasing to seven for national security charges. “They were sentenced and imprisoned on charges that stem from laws that aren’t in conformity with the Chinese government’s domestic and international human rights obligations,” the group, headquartered in Washington DC, said.
“Their cases proceeded through the full criminal justice system, with police, prosecutors, and courts arbitrarily depriving them of their liberty in violation of their human rights.”
Activists from minority communities like Tibetans and Uyghurs were disproportionately targeted through wrongful detention, as were women, it claimed.
From January 2019 to December 2024, the group said, Chinese courts gave sentences to 1,422 prisoners from the mainland and 123 from Hong Kong in violation of their human rights.
While three “prisoners of conscience” – Tashpolat Tiyip, Sattar Sawut, Yang Hengjun – were sentenced to death, 48 were sentenced to a decade or more in prison during this period.
A Uyghur academic, Rahile Dawut, was sent to prison for life in September 2023 for “endangering state security” along with Abdurazaq Sayim, the group claimed.
The group said the scale of wrongful detention by Chinese authorities may constitute "crimes against humanity".
The Chinese government under Xi Jinping is accused of persecuting minority Uyghurs and Hui Muslims in the past decade, including through a campaign of arbitrary detentions. Beijing routinely denies such allegations, and has previously called them the “lie of the century”.
The UN estimates that China has detained around a million minority Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, since a dramatic escalation in counterterrorism measures in 2017 and has also accused Beijing of committing "crimes against humanity".
In Hong Kong, authorities introduced a draconian national security law to choke dissent in the wake of 2019 pro-democracy protests. The average prison sentence under the law was over 5 years, the report said.
The report said more people were convicted of "subversion" and "inciting subversion" in Hong Kong than in mainland China. The UN previously described the offences of “subversion” and “inciting subversion” as “broad and imprecise, making them prone to misapplication and misuse".
The group claimed that the majority of some 700 older prisoners of conscience were women. “Human rights experts and international experts have raised that people over the age of 60 should generally not be held in custody due to the effects on their physical and mental health,” Angeli Datt, a research consultant with the group, said. “That two-thirds of them are women was really shocking to me.”
She claimed that “the impunity Chinese government officials enjoy at home emboldens them to commit abuses abroad”.
The group said that the Chinese government’s use of arbitrary detention to silence critics and punish rights defenders had expanded under president Xi.
If the "alarming trend" of China committing "crimes against humanity" was left unchecked, the group stated in its report, the implications would be "dire for human rights law inside and outside the country".
