A former Toronto Star reporter finds regulators “seem to have deliberately obfuscated” duty to investigate forced confession broadcast.

By Jeremy Nuttall | The Bureau

Summary

The Hogue Commission recently shed light on the CRTC’s handling of China’s state broadcaster CGTN and its content broadcast into Canada.

Jeremy Nuttall, a former reporter at the Toronto Star, looks back at a concerning complaint revisited at the Hogue foreign interference inquiry filed by Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights worker and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders (an NGO dedicated to monitoring disappearances in China). On January 3, 2016, Dahlin, at the time based in Beijing, was taken away by security agents to a “black jail” detention center where he was held and interrogated for three weeks for threatening national security.

For the seven years he lived in Beijing, Dahlin had run the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, a rights organization that promoted the rule of law through legal trainings and public interest litigation. Dahlin founded the NGO with civil rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, a prominent member of the 709 lawyers, a group targeted in the summer of 2015 by President Xi Jingping’s crackdown on the country’s civil rights defenders. [See China’s Quixotic Lawyers Take On the Communist Party]

After weeks of sleep deprivation and questioning, without access to a lawyer, Dahlin obtained his release through a forced confession to fabricated allegations of espionage in an interview set up with a news correspondent from China Central Television, the state broadcaster. The set of prepared answers Dahlin had been given to read was recorded and broadcast by Chinese state media, including CGTN and CCTV-4. Writes Nuttall:

Yes, that’s the same CGTN you could easily get in your home via a cable package if you wanted to flip back and forth between creepy propaganda and Hockey Night in Canada.

The thing is, while watching grown men beat the crap out of each other in pursuit of a black hunk of rubber may be perfectly legal, showing torture and forced confessions to fabricated political crimes on prime-time television is not.

Despite the CRTC’s responsibility to enforce regulations and its warning to Chinese broadcasters against airing “abusive” content in 2006, the agency failed to act. The CRTC’s response to inquiries about Dahlin’s case was consistently noncommittal, says Nuttall, even going so far as to deny responsibility for regulating foreign broadcasters.

The CRTC’s representative, Scott Shortliffe, testified at the Hogue Commission that the hearing process for Dahlin’s complaint remains open. This means that the CRTC never took action against CGTN and CCTV-4. The agency’s inaction contrasts with UK regulators, writes Nuttall, who deplatformed a PRC-owned broadcaster for similar complaints.

He also notes how swiftly the CRTC pulled “Russia Today” off the air for propaganda targeting Ukrainians but did not take similar action against CGTN.

The CRTC’s inaction, says Nuttall, suggests a feckless bureaucracy uninterested in fulfilling its duties or defending public values, despite the oath of office requiring employees to faithfully and honestly fulfill their duties. He concludes:

Someone at the CRTC, for some reason, decided that this oath, their job, and the suffering of people humiliated by CGTN didn’t matter. But why?

For the full-text of this report, see the publisher’s website here.