Taiwan has to work with international organisations to push Beijing to ensure the rights of a Taiwan-based democracy advocate who has been detained in China for a year now, non-governmental organisations told Taipei yesterday. On the first anniversary of the arrest of rights activist Lee Ming-che, Taiwan-based groups urged President Tsai Ing-wen to better deal with China and help ensure Lee’s family’s rights to visit him.
Lee, 43, went missing on March 19, 2017, after he entered China from Macau.
On September 11, Lee pleaded guilty to charges of “subversion of state power” in a court in the Chinese province of Hunan.
Since then, his family has been barred from entering China to visit him.
Lee had been promoting democracy through Chinese social media channels while still living and working in Taiwan.
Yesterday, dozens of Taiwanese rights activists gathered in front of the office of the president, shouting slogans such as “Free Lee Immediately”, “Lee is Innocent”, and “Freedom of Speech”.
“Lee’s rights have been violated because clothes sent by his family to China were even rejected,” Chiu E-ling, secretary-general of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, told a news conference.
Huang Yi-bee, head of the Taipei-based rights watchdog Covenants Watch, said Taiwanese non-governmental organisations on Friday had sent a letter to the United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, asking it to investigate the case of Lee in China.
Yesterday, Chen Ming-tong, the new minister of the Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan’s top government agency on policy dealings with Beijing, took office.
Chen said he looked forward to better interactions with China.
China cut off all official communication with Taiwan in late June 2016, one month after Tsai, of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, took office..
Activists march during the Commemorating Lee Ming-che’s One Year Of Imprisonment Protest in Taipei yesterday.
