»China könnte seine Internierungslager schließen, um andere auszubauen«

On 15 November 2013, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP or, the Party) called for the abolition of the country’s long-standing system of Re-education Through Labour (RTL) in its Central Committee Resolution passed during the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress (Third Plenum). This followed reports in domestic media on 7 January 2013 that Meng Jianzhu, head of the Political and Legal committee of the CCP, announced the suspension of the RTL system by the end of the year.3 The decision to abolish the country’s largest system of administrative detention is a welcome step and the shutting down of all RTL camps would be a positive development for China’s criminal justice system.

For nearly 60 years China’s RTL system has allowed the authorities, in practice often the police, to lock people up for up to four consecutive years, including for an initial three-year period followed by a one year extension, without judicial review, appeal, or any due process. Set up initially in the mid-1950s as a way to punish perceived political enemies of the CCP, including “counter-revolutionaries”, “landlords”, and “rightists”, China’s RTL system continued over subsequent decades to provide the authorities a way to punish perceived political threats, those perceived to threaten social stability, and “petty” criminals with the loss of liberty without due process and often for simply exercising their right to freedom of expression, freedom of belief, and other civil and political rights. Over the decades the shifting population of the camps thus provided a mirror on the shifting political and crime control priorities of the CCP. Over the years hundreds of thousands of individuals suffered arbitrary detention in abusive conditions inside the RTL system, with tens of thousands being subjected to torture and other ill-treatment.

The shutting down of the RTL system would hopefully spare further hundreds of thousands from the loss of liberty without due process and the abusive conditions that characterized this institution. Yet the authorities have not publicly announced how the abolition will be carried out or what will replace the RTL system.

While welcoming the total abolition of China’s RTL system, without a more fundamental change in the policies and practices that drive punishment of individuals and groups for nothing more than exercising their rights, there is the very real risk that the Chinese authorities will abolish one system of arbitrary detention only to expand the use of other types.

As suggested by the Chinese saying – “to change the soup but not the medicine” – authorities could continue to punish and persecute individuals for exercising their rights, as well as to deny due process to “petty” criminals simply through different institutional channels. The concern that the abolition of the RTL system will simply be a change in form but not in content has been expressed by Chinese and international commentators.4 In a statement released after the Third Plenum, the China Lawyers’ Group for the Protection of Human Rights called for the shutting down of all forms of illegal deprivation of liberty, not just the RTL system.

Initial evidence gathered recently by Amnesty International as reports of the closure of RTL camps started to come in, suggests that the authorities are increasingly using alternative channels of arbitrary detention as well as criminal prosecutions of individuals who previously may have been sent to RTL.

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