House arrest instances in China could pass over a million in next 3 years: Report

Beijing [China], September 7 : Under the Chinese President Xi Jinping, the law enforcement's use of house arrests or "residential surveillance" has risen sharply, media reports said citing a research by Safeguard Defenders.
While assuming that only two-thirds of cases appear and some cases of residential surveillance are never tried, Safeguard Defenders estimated that unrecorded house arrests could be at least triple the number of cases in the official database. The group, therefore, predicts that the number of lawful instances could pass 1 million at some point in the next three years.
According to the estimates in the report released Tuesday, over a quarter of a million officially approved instances of house arrest take place each year, up from fewer than 10,000 in 2013.
Testimonies gathered by Safeguard Defenders suggest that house arrest is often misused to threaten and silence Chinese human rights activists and their families.
Cheng Yuan, an activist working against workplace discrimination was arrested in July 2019 on subversion charges. Soon after his wife Shi Minglei was informed by Chinese security agents that she too would be placed under "residential surveillance" on suspicion of similar offences, as per the Washington Post.
It is interesting to note that though her husband has worked as an activist and fought for the rights of the people, Shi had never worked for a nongovernmental organization. While speaking with the media portal, she shared that the charges puzzled her.
However, the officials were determined in levelling charges against her and maintained she was being investigated. She was asked to hand over her ID card, passport, driver's license, social insurance card, cellphone, computer and bank cards.
Shi, who remained under house arrest for 180 days, was terrified primarily about the implications for her 3-year-old daughter. "As a mother, if you cannot protect your child and give her freedom from fear -- it scares me to death," she said. Her husband was handed a five-year prison sentence in July 2021.
For suspects in poor health, Chinese legal scholars argued that the measure is meant to function as a less invasive alternative to pretrial detention.
"It has become a flexible tool that the police have impunity to use however they want," said Peter Dahlin, director of Safeguard Defenders.
Some uses of "residential surveillance" may be a better option for suspects than being held in detention centers, but revisions to China's criminal procedure law in 2012 and 2018 have made the measure more invasive and opened it up to misuse because of minimal judicial review requirements, he said.
Safeguard Defenders' tally of official "residential surveillance" cases recorded in the China's apex court, the Supreme People's Court's, online judgment database shows an increase from 5,549 in 2013 to at least 40,184 in 2020. Incomplete data for 2021, caused by a delay between rulings and cases appearing in the database, showed that at least 15,403 instances of house arrest had been logged so far.
Only a portion of China's total legal cases are recorded in the database, and it rarely includes politically sensitive cases such as those touching on national security or involving dissidents and human rights activists. In recent years, some verdicts deemed unsuitable for public attention have begun to disappear.