Australia’s public media, the Special Services Broadcasting Service (SBS), announced on March 5 that it was suspending the transmission of news programs from China’s official media, China Central Television (CCTV) and China Global Television Network (CGTN), after becoming aware of serious human rights concerns surrounding the channels.
A spokesperson for SBS told Reuters that programs from Chinese official media CCTV and CGTN will not be broadcast on Saturday and that SBS is reviewing a complaint from a human rights group. in a statement, SBS said, “Given the serious concerns raised by the complaint and the complexity of the material involved, we have decided to suspend the broadcast of overseas-sourced CGTN and China Central Television’s news bulletins while we evaluate these services.”
A report on the SBS news website said that human rights group Safeguard Defenders also wrote to SBS after the U.K. media regulator revoked CGTN’s license to broadcast in the U.K. for “serious violations of the law. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has not yet responded to a request for comment. It is reported that SBS previously received a letter of complaint from human rights group Safeguard Defenders that China Central Television aired a forced televised confession program involving nearly 56 people between 2013 and 2020. The complaint letter reads, “These broadcasts involved the extraction, packaging and broadcast of forced and false confessions from prisoners held under conditions of coercion and torture.”
The letter continued, “These crimes involve ‘confessions’ obtained from suspects well in advance of indictment, trial or conviction, and in many cases, victims are held in solitary confinement in secret locations without access to legal counsel.” The report states that “a large amount of the ‘confessions’ were broadcast not only in China, but also internationally through China Central Television’s CCTV-4 program (CCTV-4) and CGTN.”
SBS’s World Watch is known to have regularly rebroadcast CGTN’s 15-minute English-language program and CCTV-4’s 30-minute Mandarin-language program. Previously the UK media regulator, Ofcom, revoked CGTN’s broadcast rights, but the French regulator released CGTN for broadcast.
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