Dong Guangping was arrested six months ago in Hanoi by Vietnamese police, as he waited to come to Canada. He has been missing ever since. (Toronto Association for Democracy in China)
Vietnamese government fails to respond to UN rapporteurs’ inquiry about human rights defender Dong Guangping
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Fears are growing that a Chinese human rights advocate who was holed up in Vietnam while awaiting resettlement to Canada as a refugee has been forcefully sent back to China.
Dong Guangping was last seen on Aug. 24, 2022, as he was being put in a police car, handcuffed and blindfolded, by about a dozen police officers outside his apartment in Hanoi where he had been in hiding for 31 months while waiting to be resettled in Canada. His wife and daughter reside in Toronto and he had already been granted a temporary resident visa.
Dong’s whereabouts since then is unknown, but Alex Neve, Senior Fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Ottawa, suspects he may have been sent back to China.
“The concern is that the Vietnamese government has unlawfully sent Dong Guangping over to Chinese authorities, though there is no confirmation of that,” Neve told The Epoch Times.
“He is likely now being held in incommunicado detention somewhere in China, which, amongst other things, he may very well be at grave risk of being tortured and mistreated.”
The former secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, who along with democracy groups in Toronto have been working to help rescue Dong while giving support to his family, says there has been no information forthcoming from the Vietnamese authorities on Dong’s whereabouts.
“The longer this goes on, and the longer that Vietnam refuses to provide any information, the more likely the possibility is that he is in China,” he said.
In December 2022, three U.N. special rapporteurs jointly sent an extensive letter of concern to the government of Vietnam seeking clarification about Dong’s arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance, while noting his imminent risk of being sent back to China.
The rapporteurs outlined how Dong, 64, had been harassed and imprisoned by the Chinese authorities for advocating for democracy and human rights.
The letter requested that the Vietnamese government “provide detailed information on the fate and whereabouts of Mr. Dong Guangping and all the measures taken by the authorities to search for him.”
The rapporteurs gave the Vietnamese government 60 days to respond, but it failed to do so.
A former police officer from Zhengzhou in Henan Province, Dong has long been a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its rights abuses and suppression of the Chinese people.
In an interview with The Epoch Times in August 2022, just a few weeks before he disappeared, Dong commented on the systematic sexual abuse of incarcerated female religious believers in China at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to force them to renounce their beliefs.
“The only word that can be used to describe the CCP is “evil,” he said. “The CCP is anti-human nature, anti-humanity, and it can do the cruelest things, because it is inhuman.”
Continued Surveillance and Harassment
Dong was incarcerated in China on three occasions for his work in support of human rights and democracy.
He first served three years in prison from 2001 to 2004.
Chinese authorities again detained Dong in May 2014 after he attended an event commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, and held him incommunicado for over eight months.
In 2015, Dong fled to Thailand with his wife and daughter, who were resettled to Canada as refugees. Dong was also recognized as a refugee by the U.N. and was accepted by Canada for resettlement. However, the Thai authorities allowed Dong to be taken back to China by Chinese police. Once back in the country, he was detained, forced to make a false confession on state television, and jailed again from 2016 to 2019.
Due to continued surveillance and harassment by local authorities in China after completing his sentence, Dong again fled, and finally arrived in Vietnam in January 2020. He was waiting to come to Canada and reunite with his family when he was abducted in Hanoi.
“Last year things were starting to look encouraging that Vietnam was perhaps agreeable to let him come to Canada,” Neve said, adding that there had been “very sensitive discussions” between the Vietnamese and Canadian governments regarding the arrangements.
“Then suddenly without any explanation, with no warning, he was arrested, and now almost six months later there’s absolutely no news about where he is.”
On Feb. 14, Dong’s daughter, Katherine Dong, criticized the Vietnamese government for not responding either to her, to Canadian government officials, or to the U.N. rapporteurs about her father’s whereabouts.
“The government of Vietnam continues to torment my family by refusing to explain why they arrested my father almost six months ago and what has happened to him since,” Katherine Dong said in a news release.
“I had hoped he would be safely reunited with us here in Canada by now. Instead we are left to agonize about his safety. We don’t even know where he is. They won’t answer my questions. They won’t answer questions posed by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada. Now they refuse to answer the United Nations.”
Dong’s family is worried that he may have been handed over to Chinese officials and is imprisoned somewhere in China.
“This is unacceptable and an affront to international law. Vietnamese officials must answer our simple question, ‘where is Dong Guangping?”