Human rights groups are calling for the immediate release of Chen Meng, thirty-seven, a musician imprisoned for leaking a Chinese government document. The document in question was a list of Chinese citizens with valid passports who were barred from leaving or returning to China because of their political activities. After serving four years of a twelve-year prison term, Chen is reported to be seriously ill with a liver disease. He is currently detained in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, and Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China want him freed.
Chen should never have been arrested in the first place," Sidney Jones, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. "He risked his freedom to expose the Chinese government's practice of closing its borders to outspoken citizens."
Jones noted that China signed a treaty last October, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the right of all citizens to enter and leave their own country and the right to impart information "regardless of frontiers."
"It is outrageous that Chen should be suffering in prison for damaging China's `reputation,'" said Xiao Qiang, executive director of Human Rights in China. "What really damages China is barring peaceful advocates of human rights and democracy from returning to their home country."
"The Chinese government continues to push for `dialogue' with other countries," said Xiao. "But such `dialogue' is meaningless if there is no true dialogue between Beijing and its own citizens."
The two human rights organizations said they had no way of assessing the gravity of Chen's illness, but that reports coming out were serious enough to warrant a thorough medical examination by doctors not linked to the prison system. Chen is said by some sources to be suffering from hepatitis B and C. In addition, he is thought to have been held in solitary confinement since he was detained on March 14, 1995, a situation which may have aggravated his condition. Prolonged use of solitary confinement violates both Chinese law and international human rights standards.
Chen was tried by the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court in a closed proceeding on an unknown date in 1996 and convicted of illegally providing state secrets to organizations outside China's borders. The verdict sentencing him to prison was delivered on April 15, 1997, and some months later, his appeal against his conviction was rejected. He was accused of faxing a top-secret document to "organizations outside China's borders." Translations of the verdict and appeal are appended below.
The document in question was the notorious "blacklist" of Chinese nationals or former nationals either barred from entering China or otherwise to be subjected to arrest or other measures on their arrival at the border. Although the existence of such a list had long been suspected, there was no evidence to show that one did in fact exist until Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China published a report containing the information from the document Chen Meng had sent to Hong Kong. This report, entitled "China: Enforced Exile of Dissidents: Government `Re-entry Blacklist' Revealed," was published in January 1995.
The impact of the document, entitled "A List of 49 Overseas Members of Reactionary Organizations Currently Subject to Major Control," was to strand dissident citizens abroad without legal protections of any kind, in clear violation of international law. The vast majority of the people on the list in question have done nothing more than engage in peaceful advocacy for the democratization of China and for greater respect for human rights. Fifty percent of those on the list were put on police "most wanted" notices following the June 4, 1989, crackdown. Others include former political prisoners and people who have had their Chinese passports confiscated or canceled while living overseas. Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China do not believe the document to be an exhaustive list.
As the rejection of Chen's appeal indicates, the authorities considered that the release of this document was damaging to the "reputation" of the government, and this is why it was classified. Most legal scholars reject such an application of the concept of "state secrets." According to the Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information, drafted in 1995 by an international team of human rights experts, including legal scholars, U.N. rights specialists and diplomats, restrictions on freedom of expression on national security grounds are illegitimate when their purpose is "protecting the government from embarrassment, or exposure of wrongdoing, or to entrench a particular ideology, or to conceal information about the functioning of its public institutions, or to suppress industrial action" (emphasis added).
Chen was an unemployed musician at the time of his arrest. He had obtained a copy of the document from his brother-in-law, Tang Tao, who was then a border guard and is now serving a six-year sentence for leaking state secrets. For her role in helping her brother to fax the document to Hong Kong, Chen's sister, Bai Suping, was sentenced to a two-and-a-half-year term in reeducation through labor, an administrative punishment imposed without a trial. Bai Suping completed the term in 1997.
A document recently adopted by the United Nations further demonstrates that according to international law, those who expose human rights abuses should not be subject to prosecution. Chen faxed the "blacklist" document to Hong Kong in November 1994 because he thought that the information it contained should be made public; he was clearly motivated by the desire to expose the abuse of human rights which the blacklist represented, and thus his action should be considered as protected under the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in December 1998. The Declaration's Article 8 reads:
1. Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others, to have effective access, on a non-discriminatory basis, to participation in the government of one's country and in the conduct of public affairs.
2. This includes, inter alia, the right, individually and in association with others, to submit to governmental bodies and agencies and organizations concerned with public affairs, criticism and proposals for their functioning and to draw attention to any aspect of their work which may hinder or impede the promotion, protection and realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms (emphasis added).
Human Rights in China and Human Rights Watch therefore believe that Chen and Tang Tao should be promptly released and cleared of all charges. The reports of Chen's ill-health suggest that he should be released on medical parole immediately.
