Australian journalist Cheng Lei formally arrested in China after six months' detention
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Calls renewed for humane treatment of news anchor after arrest ‘on suspicion of illegally supplying state secrets overseas’
Australian Cheng Lei has been arrested in China. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP
Daniel Hurst @danielhurstbne Mon 8 Feb 2021 16.36 AEDT First published on Mon 8 Feb 2021 15.01 AEDT
Chinese authorities have formally arrested the detained Australian citizen Cheng Lei “on suspicion of illegally supplying state secrets overseas”, prompting fresh calls for the journalist to be treated humanely.
The Australian foreign minister, Marise Payne, said the Australian government had been advised that Cheng had been formally arrested in China on Friday, about six months after she was first detained.
“Chinese authorities have advised that Ms Cheng was arrested on suspicion of illegally supplying state secrets overseas,” Payne said in a statement issued on Monday.
She said the Australian government had “raised its serious concerns about Ms Cheng’s detention regularly at senior levels, including about her welfare and conditions of detention”.
Payne said Australia expected “basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment to be met, in accordance with international norms”.
At a subsequent press conference, Payne said Australian officials would stay in close touch with Chinese authorities about the case and “provide all possible support” to Cheng.
“Our thoughts are with Ms Cheng and her family during this difficult period,” she said.
Louisa Wen, Cheng’s niece and a spokeswoman for the family, told ABC’s 7.30 program she was unsure what her aunt had been caught up in.
“I don’t think she would have done anything to harm national security in any way intentionally,” Wen said on Monday night. “We don’t know if she’s just been caught up in something that she herself didn’t realise.”
Wen said Cheng’s children, aged nine and 11, were currently living with their grandmother in Melbourne.
“Grandma is in her mid-70s and looking after the two by herself, especially over the Covid period last year … it hasn’t exactly been very easy on her,” she said.
Wen said she hoped the Australian government could do more for her aunt. She also called on the Chinese government to show more compassion and to remember Cheng was “a mother with two young kids, who really need her, and we’d love her to come home as soon as possible”.
“China’s record on press freedom is already deeply troubling,” Greste, a spokesperson for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, said on Monday.
“In the absence of evidence, Cheng’s arrest only adds to the impression that Beijing does not care about the freedom of the press. Her case stands as a clear warning to other journalists to support the government or risk being imprisoned too.”
[As China's National Security Law has pretty well shut down dissent in Hong Kong]
Comment has been sought from the Chinese embassy in Canberra.
Cheng – who was born in China but later became an Australian citizen – was working as a news anchor on a business show on CGTN. She has been detained in China since 13 August last year.
That is a form of coercive custody that allows the Chinese ministry of public security and the ministry of state security to circumvent ordinary criminal law processes and hold subjects in undisclosed locations without formal arrest, charge, trial, or access to a lawyer, for up to six months.
Payne’s statement on Monday is not the first time the Australian government has made public developments in the case.
The Australian government first revealed on 1 September that Cheng had been detained in Beijing – two weeks after Australia was notified.
They both left China after being questioned by China’s ministry of state security. They were told they were persons of interest in the investigation into Cheng.
At the time, Birtles told the ABC the episode seemed to be “one of harassment of the remaining Australian journalists” and not a “genuine effort to try and get anything useful” in the case against Cheng.
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