Deaths in China’s RSDL system - a form of detention where detainees are kept in isolation at a secret location for six months before formal arrest - comes under criticism from within the country

cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/2503153

China’s feared Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) system, a form of detention where the detainee is kept in isolation at a secret location for six months before formal arrest, has long come under heavy international criticism.

But in recent months, there have also been growing calls from inside China from legal experts, defence lawyers and in the media to reform or scrap the system following a string of deaths in RSDL.

UN human rights bodies have called out RSDL for being “tantamount to enforced disappearance” and posing “a high risk of torture or ill treatment” to detainees. Safeguard Defenders [an NGO focusing on China] has conducted extensive research into RSDL, focusing on human rights defender detainees, who are often disproportionately targeted.

These mounting calls inside China for RSDL reform come ahead of planned revisions to the country’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), which regulates RSDL.

[…]

RSDL was originally meant as a softer form of detention, a way to prevent filling up detention centres with suspects whose alleged crimes are not that serious and who are not candidates for house arrest because they do not live in the jurisdiction where the investigation is located. In 2012, the law was amended to allow police to use RSDL in cases involving national security (typically human rights defenders), terrorism and major bribery. It’s use under Xi Jinping has rapidly expanded and there is good evidence that it constitutes a crime against humanity.

[…]

Zhao Li, a partner at a Beijing-based law firm called for an end to RSDL in Jiemian News in August, saying that it was a system that allowed torture, illegal evidence collection and prolonged interrogations and interrogations under sleep deprivation.

"There is no way to improve it. As long as this system exists, it will keep being misused,” said Zhao.

[…]

At that forum, Chen Weidong, Executive Vice President of the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law Society and a professor at Renmin University, argued that RSDL was redundant. The majority of crimes committed in China, he said, were minor so that suspects could simply be released on bail. There was no need to send them to RSDL.

[…]

Chen Yongsheng, who was part of the online discussion said RSDL was “unconstitutional, could lead to false convictions, and was a serious violation of human rights”.

Beijing-based lawyer Zhou Ze told the SCMP that the conditions of RSDL made torture more likely because there was no legal requirement to record interrogations (interrogations in detention centres must be filmed) and that the location was secret and outside supervision.

[…]

Custody and Repatriation System

>This is not the first time that a death in custody has caused public outrage in China and calls for it to be abolished.

>Back in 2003, police beat a young migrant worker, Sun Zhigang, to death in southern Guangdong province while he was being held in under an administrative type of detention called Custody and Repatriation. This system enabled police to temporarily hold anyone who did not have the correct paperwork to show they had the right to live and work in that area. The night the police picked up Sun, who was from Hubei province, he had forgotten to carry his ID card.

>The outcry over his death led the government to scrap the system, just months after Sun’s death.