January 12, 2016

CHINA IS SAID TO DETAIN SWEDISH HUMAN RIGHTS WORKER

[The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs was muted about the case. Veronica Nordlund, a press officer for the ministry in Stockholm, said that a Swedish man in his mid-thirties had been detained in China, and that the embassy was working on the case. Ms. Nordlund did not identify him as Mr. Dahlin or comment on where he is being held or under what conditions.]

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BEIJING — A Swedish man who worked in support of human rights groups and grass-roots legal advocates in China has been detained in Beijing on accusations of endangering state security, supporters of the man said Tuesday. They described the detention of the Swede, Peter Jesper Dahlin, as another step in the Chinese government’s drive to silence human rights defense campaigners.
Mr. Dahlin had been living in Beijing, where he worked for the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, an organization that has trained and supported activists and lawyers seeking to “promote the development of the rule of law and counter abuses of basic human rights,” the group said in an emailed statement.
Late on Jan. 3, Mr. Dahlin disappeared while he was heading to Beijing Capital Airport for a flight to Thailand. The Chinese authorities formally detained him the next day “on suspicion of endangering state security,” the group said.
It rejected the accusations, and urged the Chinese government to immediately release Mr. Dahlin, 35, who suffers from Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder that requires daily medication.
“Peter’s detention appears to be part of the six-month-long assault on the country’s human rights lawyers,” the group said. “That Peter is a foreigner points to a serious escalation in this assault on the legal aid profession in China.”
Michael Caster, an American human rights researcher who has worked with Mr. Dahlin, said by email that Mr. Dahlin’s supporters had held off from publicly discussing the case, in the hope that quiet diplomacy could win his quick release. That opportunity appeared to have passed, Mr. Caster said.
The precise allegations against Mr. Dahlin remain unclear. At a daily news briefing on Tuesday, Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said he was unaware of the case, Reuters reported.
Mr. Dahlin risks being ensnared in the Chinese Communist Party’s broader campaign against internal dissent and Western political influence. The disclosure of the case came on the same day that the Chinese police arrested two lawyers, an intern lawyer and a legal assistant on subversion charges.
Under President Xi Jinping, the authorities have waged an intense campaign of detentions, arrests and trials of human rights lawyers and activists accused of challenging the party’s power. Party leaders have denounced Western-inspired ideas like “civil society” and an independent judiciary, and the government is developing a law for foreign nongovernment organizations that could severely restrict their activities, especially in legal and political issues.
The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs was muted about the case. Veronica Nordlund, a press officer for the ministry in Stockholm, said that a Swedish man in his mid-thirties had been detained in China, and that the embassy was working on the case. Ms. Nordlund did not identify him as Mr. Dahlin or comment on where he is being held or under what conditions.
The most pressing concern of Mr. Dahlin’s family was that he receive his medicine for Addison’s disease, his brother, Jonas Dahlin, said by telephone from Thailand, where he lives for part of the year. “Without it he will die,” Jonas Dahlin said.
“The foreign ministry has been told he’s receiving the medicine,” he said. “But they don’t know where he is, or even if he’s still in Beijing, and they haven’t been able to see him.”
The Swedish government is also grappling with the disappearance of Gu Minhai, a Swedish citizen who was a publisher in Hong Kong, who disappeared while in Thailand. Mr. Gu and his associates published books that offered salacious, and often far-fetched, stories about China’s leaders, and their supporters believe that mainland authorities have detained them.
Mr. Dahlin has lived in China since 2007; in 2009 he co-founded the China Urgent Action Working Group, a low-key organization that describes itselfas supporting rights defenders with legal aid, training rural lawyers and advocates to protect vulnerable citizens, and researching human rights developments.
Before Mr. Dahlin was detained, he had become worried that he might not be allowed to leave China, said Mr. Caster, the researcher.
“Peter’s name had come up in the interrogation of a human rights lawyer a few days prior to his detention,” Mr. Caster said. “There is some concern the authorities might try to go after Peter for some kind of financial crime as a pretext to persecute his support of human rights work.”

Additional reporting by Christina Anderson in Halmstad, Sweden

@ The New York Times