A Canadian man detained by China for more than 1,000 days said he was put into solitary confinement for months and interrogated for up to nine hours every day, treatment he said amounted to psychological torture.
Michael Kovrig, speaking to Canadian Broadcasting Corp in an interview released on Monday, also said that he had missed the birth of his daughter and only met her for the first time when she was two-and-a-half years old.
Kovrig and fellow Canadian Michael Spavor were taken into custody in December 2018 shortly after Canadian police detained Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟), chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei, on a US warrant. Both men were accused of spying.
Photo: Reuters
“I still carry a lot of pain around with me and that can be heavy at times,” Kovrig said in his first substantial comments since he and Spavor were released in September 2021.
Kovrig said that UN guidelines say prisoners should not be put into solitary confinement for more than 15 consecutive days.
“More than that is considered psychological torture. I was there for nearly six months,” said Kovrig, a former diplomat who had been working as an adviser with a think tank when arrested.
Kovrig said there was no daylight in the solitary cell, where the fluorescent lights were kept on 24 hours a day. At one point, his food ration was cut to three bowls of rice a day.
“It was psychologically absolutely, the most grueling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” he said. “It’s a combination of solitary confinement, total isolation and relentless interrogation for six to nine hours every day. They are trying to bully and torment and terrorize and coerce you ... into accepting their false version of reality.”
Kovrig and Spavor were released on the same day that the US Department of Justice dropped its extradition request for Meng and she returned to China.
The Chinese embassy in Ottawa, responding to Kovrig’s interview, said he and Spavor had been suspected of engaging in activities endangering China’s national security.
Chinese judicial authorities handled the cases in strict accordance with the law, it said in a statement.
Bilateral ties are chilly. China this month opened a one-year anti-dumping investigation into imports of rapeseed from Canada, just weeks after Ottawa announced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.
Kovrig’s partner was six months pregnant at the time of his arrest. She played their daughter recordings of his voice and showed pictures of her father so she would recognize him when they finally met.
“I’ll never forget that sense of wonder, of everything being new and wonderful again, and pushing my daughter on a swing that had her saying to her mother: ‘Mummy, I’m so happy,’” he said.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS