China targetting Hong Kong Democracy Council over involvement with UN: Report

Beijing: The United Nations, in its latest findings on reprisals, described how two senior employees of the Hong Kong Democracy Council – a Washington-based nonprofit advocating for democracy in the region – allegedly faced repeated retaliation from the Chinese government over their engagement with the UN, an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) report highlighted on Saturday.

Citing a late December 2024 UN report, the ICIJ stated that the Hong Kong government labelled senior international advocacy associate Carmen Lau and the council’s Executive Director, Anna Kwok, as fugitives for their work promoting democracy and independence in Hong Kong, offering a bounty of around $130,000 each for information leading to their arrests.

Speaking to ICIJ, Lau said the attacks had impacted her security, financial stability and freedom of movement, adding that police had interrogated members of her family still residing in Hong Kong.

She further alleged that her neighbours in London received pamphlets urging them to share information with the Hong Kong government that could lead to her arrest.

“There were letters sent to my neighbours here in the UK encouraging them to bounty hunt me, and it had all sorts of my personal information, including my precise, then-residential address,” the ICJ quoted Lau as saying.

“As an activist, I was very, very careful about my digital footprint, and I’m exceptionally cautious about my personal data security. So it was very frightening at first when I learned that they have my address and precisely my neighbours living in the same block as me,” she added – the ICIJ report spotlighted.

Lau stated that the attacks have created a chilling effect on other UK-based dissidents, many of whom fear that Beijing could also target their family members at home.

“To the broader Hong Kong diaspora, because of these acts of retaliation, it actually silences and poses a sense of fear amongst the people,” Lau said.

Furthermore, “China Targets”, a cross-border investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) along with 42 media partners, exposed how Beijing has misused international institutions such as the U.N. and Interpol to go after dissidents living abroad.

According to the ICIJ, the latest annual UN report highlighted the growing and sophisticated trend of cross-border repression targeting human rights activists, while detailing acts of intimidation and reprisals inside the international organisation.

The report cites new allegations of reprisals from two dozen countries, including China, echoing the findings of ICIJ’s China Targets investigation, which documented how suspected proxies for the Chinese government monitored or harassed activists at the UN headquarters in Geneva, the centre of the global human rights system.

IANS