6 No. 67 JUSTICE Likewise, both the Canadian Parliament and the U.S. Congress have passed resolutions calling on China to release Dr. Wang. A bipartisan group of former Canadian Cabinet Ministers, which I joined as a former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, recently sent an open letter to the Chinese foreign minister decrying Wang’s solitary confinement and his three debilitating strokes. We have warned that he has a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19 and protested his being denied access to family members and legal counsel. Chinese Communist Party authorities have continued to harass and intimidate Wang’s Canadian family members. For example, after over a decade of visa requests, his daughter Ti-Anna was finally issued a visa in 2019, only to be detained upon her arrival at the Beijing airport and deported back to Canada without being permitted to see her ailing father. The second political prisoner in China, Huseyin Celil, is a Canadian citizen and Uyghur activist who has been held in a Chinese prison for fourteen years. Similar to the experience of Dr. Wang, Celil was arrested in 2006 during a trip with his family to Uzbekistan and brought back to China in 2007. He has been held at a secret location and denied access to legal counsel, family, and Canadian officials. Celil has also spent much of his time in solitary confinement and is suffering from poor health. His case and cause have not been sufficiently examined by Canadian authorities. Indeed, in February 2020, the Canadian ambassador to China mistakenly told a parliamentary committee that Celil was not a Canadian citizen, and that Canadian officials were therefore not obliged to help him. The targeted abductions, arbitrary detentions, torture in detention, false and trumped-up charges, and culture of impunity continue as I write. In 2018, Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were abducted, arrested, tortured in detention, and currently face spurious espionage charges. Their abductions and arrests occurred following the Canadian Government’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou (December 2018), an executive of the Chinese company Huawei, pursuant to a U.S.- Canada Extradition Treaty. However, while Meg Wanzhou has been free on bail, provided with the best legal counsel, and able to challenge her extradition before Canadian courts, the targeted abduction of the“two Michaels”has been an exercise in hostage diplomacy by the Chinese Communist Party. These two case studies are not isolated ones, instead demonstrating the pattern of oppression and criminalization of fundamental freedoms that has become characteristic of resurgent global authoritarianism, and the impunity that underpins it. II. Case Study: Khomeini’s Iran The second case study is the supreme leader Ayatolla Ali Khomeini’s Iran. Close to three years ago, the RWCHR published a report titled,“Realizing Rights Over Repression in Iran,” documenting and detailing the assault by the Iranian regime, where they target leaders of all civil society groups in Iran: assaults on women, journalists, environmentalists, lawyers, trade unionists, religious and ethnic minorities, students, peace protesters, dual nationals, and the like. Overall, this reflects a widespread and systematic assault on human rights, and amounts to the criminalization of innocence, and the criminalization of fundamental freedoms. Since the publication of this report, the assaults on each of these civil society groups has intensified, together with increasing numbers of arrests, detentions, torture, convictions, and imprisonment in COVID-19 infested prisons. The women’s movement in Iran is a looking glass into these patterns of massive repression, which now include the disturbing trend of banishing these women human rights defenders to exile in remote prisons, far from public scrutiny, and where they are at risk of infection from COVID-19 or worse. This was a subject of a recent RWCHR petition to the UNWorking Group on Women’s Rights. The banishing of women rights defenders to remote prisons, far removed from their place of residence, also inflicts further psychological suffering on their families, by depriving them of their ability to visit their loved ones. While Evin Prison may be the primary site for detaining political prisoners in Iran, women rights defenders are increasingly being sent to prisons with even harsher conditions. Qarchak Prison, sometimes described as “the end of the world,” is of particular concern, as it is infamously known for having the worst conditions in Iran. At Qarchak Prison, over 1,000 women are confined to a former livestock warehouse in tenmeter, windowless cells with at least twelve inmates per cell. The prison does not have proper ventilation, clean air, drinkable water, or adequate food or medicine. There are constant fires burning in the fields surrounding the prisoners, and the prison itself has a poorly installed sewage system. Prisoners constantly have trouble breathing. Moreover, these women political prisoners are held in the same cells as inmates convicted of violent crimes. All that has been mentioned above is in violation of both Iranian and international law.
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