In a two-part podcast interview with The Economist’s Drum Tower, former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig has described the “nightmare Groundhog Day” of his 1,019-day detention in China. Kovrig was one of two Canadians held for nearly three years from December 2018 after Canada acted on an American extradition request against Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, also the daughter of the firm’s founder.
Chinese diplomats denied in public that the two Michaels—as the press soon dubbed them—were being held as hostages until Canada released Ms Meng. But in private, Chinese officials told Canadian diplomats that if they wanted the two Michaels released, they had to set Ms Meng free. In September 2021 China stopped trying to conceal its hostage-taking. Mr Kovrig and Mr Spavor were allowed to fly home to Canada on the same day that Ms Meng was permitted to leave, after a deal with American prosecutors in which she avoided criminal charges over alleged breaches of sanctions on Iran.
[…] The word “stubborn” hardly begins to convey the Canadian’s approach to his detention. Denied books for many months, he finally asked for copies of a sacred Communist Party text: Xi Jinping’s “The Governance of China”. He correctly guessed that his captors would not dare deny a request to study the wisdom of China’s supreme leader. Later he asked for works of Stoic and Buddhist philosophy, and for a dictionary to improve his Chinese. To stave off despair he recalled his whole life in order like a film, while walking thousands of paces a day.
[…] Mr Kovrig hopes that by refusing to confess and by making his court statement for the record, he left a trace of his resistance for posterity. “It’s a bureaucratic authoritarian system,” he tells Drum Tower. “They’re going to file this away somewhere. One day somebody will know.” [Source]
Part one of the interview explains the events leading up to Kovrig’s detention, and his capture itself. In part two, Kovrig describes his experiences in custody, and the lessons he has drawn:
Do you feel safe from China’s long arm? Or do you feel that the system has no more claim on you? Or does it affect how you travel, where you travel?
There’s no such thing as being completely safe from that system. And what I would hope that this entire story illustrates is that that is fundamentally not a rule-of-law system. The Communist Party uses the law as a political tool and weapon. It will adhere to international treaties and agreements when they suit it, and ignore them when they don’t; and subvert them when that suits its purposes, or even try to write and revise new ones. In the case of my own detention, they violated my human rights on various counts; they violated the international convention against torture, because the treatment they subjected me to is unquestionably psychological torture; they violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and the Canada-China Consular Treaty and a number of other agreements. So if they wouldn’t honor those agreements before, why would they honor their own laws and things now?
The bottom line of that is that I hope that things will be fine now, but I live in a world where one can never make that assumption. And that is not just with respect to me—this is a hybrid challenge that all countries that value their own sovereign and independent decision-making need to understand much more clearly. One of the reasons why I wouldn’t go along with the false Chinese narrative that they kept trying to construct around us was that ultimately, when you start making that kind of compromise, it’s a slippery slope. So you need to have a very clear understanding when interacting with anyone from that system what your values are, what your principles are … but also what your interests are, either as an organization or as a country. And you need to be ready to firmly defend those and push back when necessary. [Source]
Peter Zimonjic of CBC’s The National also conducted an interview with Kovrig last month:
He was taken down the hall to a padded cell. There was a bunk in the corner. Two plainsclothes guards shut a thick door with a magnetic lock.
“That room was essentially my universe for almost six months. That room and the room across the hall, which was the interrogation room,” he said.
The windows to his padded cell were blacked out and fluorescent lights stayed on 24 hours a day.
“It was psychologically, absolutely, the most gruelling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” he said. “It’s a combination of … total isolation and relentless interrogation for six to nine hours every day, on and on and on.”
[…] “The United Nations standard is no more than 15 days in solitary confinement. More than that is considered psychological torture. I was there for nearly six months.” [Source]
