The human rights activist had been arrested in January but friends dismiss the TV stunt as ‘ridiculous and absurd’

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Supporters of Peter Dahlin, the Swedish human rights activist being held by Chinese police, have dismissed allegations he was a foreign agent attempting to undermine the Communist party as ridiculous and absurd.



Dahlin, a Beijing-based campaigner who was detained in early January, was paraded on Chinese television on Tuesday night to make what friends and colleagues describe as a “forced confession”.



Tom Phillips (@tomphillipsin) "I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people"- Swedish activist Peter Dahlin paraded on state TV for 'confession' pic.twitter.com/9j3uV4qZHv

“I have no complaints to make. I think my treatment has been fair,” Dahlin, 35, says in the footage which was aired on state broadcaster CCTV. “I have been given good food, plenty of sleep and I have suffered no mistreatments of any kind.”

“I violated Chinese law through my activities here,” the activist adds. “I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I apologise sincerely for this and I am very sorry that this has happened.”



Xinhua, China’s government-controlled news agency, claimed Dahlin’s detention on 3 January was part of a police operation to “smash” an “illegal organisation that sponsored activities jeopardising China’s national security”.

It alleged that Dahlin’s human rights group, the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group or CUAWG, had “hired and trained others to gather, fabricate and distort information about China”.

Police claimed the group “also organised others to interfere with sensitive cases, deliberately aggravating disputes and instigating public-government confrontations to create mass incidents”.

Xinhua also insinuated that Dahlin was a foreign agent. It said two witnesses interviewed by police claimed “western anti-China forces had planted Dahlin and some other people in China to gather negative information for anti-China purposes such as smear campaigns”.

The group was supposedly tasked with “fanning anti-government and anti-Party sentiment, and deceiving people to disrupt state and social order, thus, changing the social system of China,” the government-controlled news agency added.

State media accused Dahlin of having “pocketed” large sums of money sent into China from overseas.



Speaking on Wednesday, Michael Caster, who worked alongside Dahlin at CUAWG, told the Guardian his friend and colleague appeared to have been coerced into making parts of the statement.

“The lines about being sorry for causing harm to the Chinese government or Chinese state are clearly scripted. There was really never a point that he considered what he was doing to be harmful to the Chinese state or the Chinese society,” he said, noting that the Swedish activist appeared “strained” in the television “confession”.



Caster said it was true that Dahlin and CUAWG had been attempting to help Chinese civil society by offering training and support to human rights lawyers who were trying to provide justice to China’s disenfranchised and downtrodden.



However, he rejected the suggestion that Dahlin had been doing so for any “nefarious or malicious” purpose or for personal gain.



Caster said: “I think that is part of the whole process of just trying to delegitimise him, delegitimise his work.”



“Clearly all of this is meant to smear his character and to really incriminate him both as this sort of nasty foreign infiltrator who is in China, up to no good and who is not only causing an escalation in this kind of conflict but trying to profit from it.”

He added: “I think it is absurd to claim that Peter was planted in China by some foreign government or foreign forces to destabilise the country or to cause any type of escalation in conflict when all he was ever involved in doing, and all the organisation was ever involved in doing, was empowering many villagers or Chinese citizens at a grassroots level to find redress for their grievances using Chinese law.”

Caster also rejected claims that Dahlin, who first came to China in 2007, had been leading a “luxurious life and travelling the world and personally profiting” from his work.

“If someone wanted to personally profit they wouldn’t be working in the non-profit sector trying to get rich off of grants that have a pretty rigorous financial reporting system in place,” he said.



Asked to comment on Dahlin’s televised “confession”, a spokesperson for the Swedish embassy in Beijing said: “We have noted the reports in the media but we have nothing more to say about these.”



“The Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Embassy in Beijing continue to work intensively on the matter,” the embassy spokesperson added in an email to the Guardian.

Dahlin’s detention appears to be part of a major government offensive against China’s community of outspoken human rights lawyers that began in July last year with the detention and interrogation of scores of Chinese attorneys and their staff.



Xinhua claimed CUAWG had connections to Fengrui, a Beijing-based law practice at the centre of that crackdown.



Just over six months after the government campaign began, some of China’s most respected rights lawyers are now facing political subversion charges that could see them jailed for life.



On Monday leading European, North American and Australian lawyers urged president Xi Jinping to step back from his crackdown on lawyers.



Caster said that while Beijing was attempting to paint Dahlin as the villain it was in fact the Chinese government that was violating the law by attempting to criminalise human rights work within its borders.



“The government clearly is behaving so that the protection, the documentation [and] the defence of human rights is seen as a subversive action which is in direct opposition to even their obligations under international law.”



He noted that more than two weeks after Dahlin and his Chinese girlfriend, Pan Jinling, were both apparently taken by security forces there was still no word on her fate.



“Her situation by the letter of the law amounts to an enforced disappearance without question,” Caster said. “There has been no acknowledgment of having her. Her whereabouts are unknown. Her condition is unknown.”

