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- Canadian citizen Michael Kovrig detained in China for over 1,000 days describes experience as psychological torture
Canadian citizen Michael Kovrig detained in China for over 1,000 days describes experience as psychological torture
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Michael Kovrig, a Canadian citizen, was detained in China in December 2018 on allegations of espionage. He was held in solitary confinement for six months and subjected to psychological torture through relentless interrogation. Kovrig spent a total of 1,019 days in a Chinese prison before his release. During his detention, he was interrogated for nine hours a day and missed the birth of his daughter, meeting her for the first time when she was two-and-a-half years old. The detention was widely considered to be in retaliation for the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, a Canadian citizen.
China upholds the rule of law, and China's judicial authorities handle cases in strict accordance to the law.
We urge relevant parties to respect facts and reflect upon their own mistakes.
Lies and smearing won't change the fact that (Kovrig) conducted illegal and criminal activities.
They are trying to bully and torment and terrorise and coerce you … into accepting their false version of reality.
I still carry a lot of pain around with me and that can be heavy at times.
More than that is considered psychological torture. I was there for nearly six months.
You're never actually alone. They've always got guards in there with you, and they're constantly looking at you.
The critical one is simply that it took a long time for the Canadian government to figure out the best way to deal with it, and it may not have used all the leverage and the options that it had available to it because it was such an unusual circumstance.
At that point they said, 'You are under suspicion of endangering China's state security. You are going to be interrogated,'
Of course, that sense of confinement combined with constant surveillance really gets into your skull. It's psychologically exceedingly difficult to deal with.
You can imagine what that was like for (my girlfriend). It's an abrupt shock while she's pregnant, and she doesn't know if she's going to see me ever again.
They're gaslighting you. They're actually drawing you into a world day after day, minute by minute, hour by hour, in which up is down and black is white and night is day.
It was really only once I actually came back that I could appreciate how geopolitically significant it was that Canada had been dragged into this geopolitical grudge match between the United States and China.
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'.
I could finally hold my daughter, and she's such a happy, friendly little kid.
It was psychologically, absolutely, the most grueling, painful thing I've ever been through.
We came up a spiral staircase right in front of the plaza in front of my apartment building, and boom.
Gradually, over time, I was able to kind of piece together the bread crumbs and figure out that this was quite a big deal and very public.
There's a dozen men in black with cameras on them surrounding us, shouting in Chinese, 'That's him.'
They grabbed me and in front of my pregnant girlfriend, dragged me into a black SUV, stuffed me into the back seat, put a set of handcuffs on me, blindfolded me and drove off into the night.
I told myself really early on that they're never going to see me cry. They're not going to see me being weak, because if they do, they'll exploit that.
