Swedish human rights activist Peter Dahlin is a familiar name to those who follow human rights issues in China. Now Dahlin has a new title and mission, as his human rights organization, Safeguard Defenders, is launching a global campaign against CCTV and has succeeded in getting the British government to revoke CCTV’s landing license.
In an interview with the Voice of America, Darling said the targeting of CCTV is an attempt to push China into a corner and stop broadcasting TV confessions that violate human rights and the rule of law, or “face the possibility of having their license revoked.
On Wednesday (April 7) the French media regulator, the French Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), confirmed that it had received the first complaint from the “protection guards” against the Chinese official TV network CGTN; last month, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also announced that it had begun reviewing complaints about CCTV’s televised confessions in the US. In February, British authorities revoked CCTV’s broadcast license in the U.K. based on a complaint from the “Protector”. Why did Darling target CCTV?
It all started five years ago.
One night in early 2016, Darling, a longtime advocate for Chinese rights lawyers, was taken from his Beijing home by a dozen Chinese state security officers and was immediately lost.
More than two weeks later, he suddenly appeared on the screens of China Central Television (CCTV) to confess his guilt.
“I have engaged in activities in China that violate Chinese law and have seriously hurt the Chinese government and the feelings of the Chinese people,” Darling, dressed in a black shirt and gray cardigan, said calmly on camera, “for which I am deeply sorry.”
During his more than two weeks of disappearance, Darling was placed under “residential surveillance” (RSDL) – no lawyer, days of marathon interrogations, long hours under fluorescent lights, and even his daily medication confiscated.
Darin was kept in solitary confinement in a strictly suicide proof room, where he would occasionally hear the sound of someone being beaten upstairs (he later learned that it was a co-worker who was being held with him).
His girlfriend, who had nothing to do with Darling’s work, was also held in the same “dark prison” that was closed to the public, and at one point was threatened with 10 years in prison.
“The memory that still sticks in my mind – kind of traumatic, I guess – is that they also put my girlfriend under ‘designated residence surveillance’ just to pressure me,” Darling told VOA. I was under that kind of pressure every day for a while.”
After two weeks in custody, Darling made a video confession. He was then released on medical parole.
On Jan. 25, Darling was taken blindfolded to the Beijing airport for a flight back to Sweden and told he would not be allowed to enter China for 10 years. His girlfriend was also released the same day.
Targeting CCTV
Fast forward five years. Today Peter Darling heads the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders. The Madrid, Spain-based NGO is dedicated to promoting human rights and the rule of law in Asia. In recent years, Darling has led Safeguard Defenders to promote the investigation of CCTV violations in various countries around the world, especially the illegal broadcast of the guilty plea video.
“China wants to keep its cake and eat it,” Darling told VOA. “China wants to integrate and profit from the international community, but it doesn’t want to be tied to the standards that prevail in the international community.”
As China has cracked down on civil society in recent years, the authorities’ increasingly frequent use of televised confessions and accompanying “residential surveillance” for human rights defenders and dissidents has become a key concern for Darling and the Defenders. In November 2018, they launched a campaign to “get the West to start regulating Chinese television broadcasting” and began filing complaints in Western democracies about CCTV’s broadcast of televised guilty pleas and other violations of local media-related laws.
The first battle was won in the UK
The first shot of the campaign was fired in the UK.
On November 23, 2018, Peter Humphrey, a former British journalist and businessman who was forced to make a televised confession in Shanghai, held a media conference with Darling, focusing on the violations of CCTV and its international affiliate China Global Television Network (CGTN) in the UK.
On the same day, Han submitted a formal complaint to Ofcom against CCTV with the support of the Protector, alleging that CGTN violated the privacy and fair treatment standards of UK broadcasting law by broadcasting a televised confession of Han after he was drugged, handcuffed and placed in a cage. The news immediately reached the news agency on Friday evening.
The news immediately reached Beijing, where it was already Friday evening. An emergency meeting was held that night at CCTV headquarters, which lasted all weekend, to discuss the crisis from the UK. During that time, CCTV was in the midst of preparing for a major plan to locate its London office.
After Han Feilong’s letter of complaint was submitted, the Guardian continued to follow up. Angela Gui, the daughter of Swedish-born Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, who was forced to make a televised confession and whose whereabouts are still unknown, as well as former Hong Kong Causeway Bay bookstore manager Lam Wing-kee and former British Consulate employee Cheng Man-kit, who were also forced to make televised confessions, have also been supported by Defenders. Ofcom has filed a similar complaint with Ofcom.
Ofcom launched a formal investigation into these complaints against CGTN.
In addition, last year, the Defender filed an additional complaint against CGTN regarding its broadcasting license, which Ofcom also initiated an investigation into.
This series of actions began to bear fruit last year.
In July last year, Han Longfei’s complaint was successful when Ofcom ruled that CGTN had violated the fairness and privacy principles of UK broadcasting law by broadcasting a video of him confessing to a crime. In March this year, CGTN was fined £100,000 for the incident.
“The biggest success for the Guardian came in early February, when Ofcom revoked CGTN’s license to broadcast in the U.K. after a year-long investigation into the issue that concluded CGTN did not meet licensing requirements.
Ofcom’s investigation concluded that CGTN’s licensee, Star Chinese Media, had no editorial control over CGTN’s content and that CGTN was controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
U.S., Australia, Canada and France take action
“In 2019, Defenders filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against CCTV4 and CGTN for broadcasting television confessions, but received no response from the FCC. In March of this year, Defenders resubmitted its complaint to the FCC, and this time, the FCC publicly stated a few days later that it had begun reviewing Defenders’ complaint against CCTV’s guilty plea for broadcasting television in the United States.
While the First Amendment protects the media’s freedom of speech, the FCC expressly prohibits broadcast media from deliberately misrepresenting news. “In its complaint, Defenders alleges that CCTV knowingly and actively cooperated with Chinese authorities to record, edit and broadcast a video of a forced guilty plea obtained through coercion and deception, and therefore “broadcast information it knew to be false.
Darling told VOA that the FCC’s response to the complaint was positive, and he is confident that the FCC will launch a formal investigation of CCTV4 and CGTN.
“We know there will be a lot of political support within the United States for such an investigation,” Darling said.
In addition to the U.K. and the U.S., Defenders has also filed complaints against CCTV in Australia, Canada, France and other countries.
In March, Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) announced it was temporarily suspending content from CGTN and CCTV4 due to complaints related to TV guilty pleas. Canada has launched an investigation into the complaint, but has yet to announce the outcome.
On April 7, France’s media authority, the CSA, said it had received the first complaint against CGTN from the “Defender of Protection” for broadcasting footage of Uighur girls forced to confess, and that it was investigating and closely monitoring CGTN and would intervene if it violated the law.
Xi Jinping wants to tell China’s story, West has leverage in hand
Darling told VOA that the Guardians of Protection will next pressure TV service providers in democratic countries to refuse to participate in the Chinese government’s “political terrorism” and to stop cooperating with CCTV in response to the latter’s televised confessions.
Darling said the goal of the campaign is not to get CGTN or CCTV4 off the air in any country.
“Our goal is to force CCTV to stop participating in this violation of human rights and the rule of law, to stop broadcasting this kind of content, this forced confession of compromise.”
Darling said the Defenders have made considerable progress toward that goal.
He said there has been a significant reduction in the frequency of televised guilty pleas on CCTV International since the campaign began, especially since the opening of a formal investigation into CGTN in the United Kingdom.
“Expanding China’s soft power is a policy to which Xi attaches great importance. If you want to ‘tell the Chinese story,’ you need the media and you need TV stations. The action we took pushed China into a corner: either continue to air such confession videos and then face the possibility of having their licenses revoked, or stop airing these confession videos and keep their broadcast licenses,” Darling said. “We think that ultimately they will choose the latter, and keeping the TV channels operating is much more important to them than airing confession videos It’s much more important.”
On April 7, CGTN published an opinion piece on its website, calling Darling an “anti-China crusader” and calling Darling’s “Protector” group “true scoundrel” (true scoundrel).
For the complaint action may provoke China’s retaliation, Darling is not worried about this, he believes that China in the punishment of foreign media in fact no good hand to play the card. China has already walled off almost all foreign media platforms, he said, and the most they can do is make the working conditions of foreign journalists worse. But the trend of China tightening its grip on foreign media reporters has been ongoing, regardless of whether countries take action against CCTV.
Darling observes that while the UK revoked CGTN’s license, it didn’t see much retaliation from China. While BBC World News was subsequently banned from landing in China, previously the BBC was also generally available in China only in some luxury hotels and expatriate neighborhoods, a retaliation that was far more symbolic than actually damaging.
Darling believes these actions by Britain and Australia will send positive signals to other countries.
“The threat of retaliation by China is overrated, and people shouldn’t be afraid to do what they should do in this case.” Darling said.
Tormenting, humiliating useless, only provoking resistance
“The purpose of a televised admission of guilt is not just to scare someone, but to scare an entire group of people,” Darling told Voice of America.
He cited the example of the televised confessions used to shame human rights lawyer Wang Yu to scare off all human rights lawyers doing similar work, and the televised confessions of journalists or foreigners working for NGOs.
“By any definition, televised guilty pleas are a form of political terrorism,” Darling said, “so it’s important to resist and fight back against this kind of behavior.”
Soon after his deportation by the Chinese government, Darling soon began “resisting and fighting back.
He took on the position of head of Human Rights Defenders and traveled to Thailand to continue his work on human rights in Asian countries. It was there that the idea of systematically countering China’s forced television confessions took root.
“I remember sitting in a small bar in northern Thailand with my colleague Michael Castor one Friday night in 2017, having a drink,” Darling recalls of the beginning of the complaint campaign, “and discussing how Chinese rights lawyers were facing We were having a self-talking brainstorm about all the new issues that Chinese rights lawyers were facing, but that hadn’t been given enough attention by the international community.”
“It occurred to me at the time that, oh yeah, those televised guilty pleas that have been shown over and over again on television, we’ve never really read the literature that specifically examines that,” Darling told Voice of America, “other than my own experience and that of a couple of other colleagues, we’ve never really understood what’s going on and what was really going on behind the scenes here.”
On April 11, 2018, Protective Guardian released the world’s first in-depth study of forced TV admissions in China, titled “Choreographed Before They Go On Stage: Behind the Scenes of China’s Forced TV Admissions,” which documents and analyzes 45 documented TV admissions between 2013 and 2018 in a case study format to It shows firsthand how Chinese state security agents play the role of “director” in obtaining video confessions from detainees through the cameras of the official media and the active cooperation of various parties, coupled with high-handed tactics such as torture or threats to family and friends.
The report also reveals that many detainees were deliberately deceived before the videos were recorded, and were told that the videos would not be made public and would be used primarily by judges and “higher-ups” to try cases. In addition, the forced televised confessions cited in the report occurred before the detainees were formally arrested or brought to trial, a violation of established rule of law procedures.
Darling said the groundbreaking report, which has also been translated into Chinese, has allowed the public and media, both inside and outside China, to truly understand the truth behind the televised confessions and has changed the way they view and report on televised confessions. Darling also said the publication of the report was the real beginning of this campaign to complain about CCTV.
“There was never a moment when I considered stopping the work that I was doing. The Chinese human rights activists, lawyers and journalists I’ve dealt with are generally of the same mindset. Much of their dedication and motivation comes from having personally suffered,” Darling said.
“Torturing people, humiliating people, putting them in jail, that doesn’t really work,” Darling continued, “because once these people are free, they go back to work twice as hard on these issues, and that’s a very inspiring thing. ”
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