Curated By: Shankhyaneel Sarkar
Last Updated: June 17, 2023, 10:57 AM IST
Washington D.C., United States of America (USA)
Mark Swidan (R) and Kai Li (L) have been held in Chinese prisons with the former on a death row. (Image: @HostageAid/Twitter)
Blinken will head to China on June 18 and Texan Republicans are urging him to secure the release of Mark Swidan, Kai Li and David Lin.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz and House of Representatives member Michael Cloud, both from Texas, are pushing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to ensure that Americans wrongfully detained in China are released.
Mark Swidan, a 48-year-old Texas businessman, is on death row in China and has been imprisoned since 2012. The other Americans detained in China are 67-year-old David Lin, a pastor who has been imprisoned in China since 2006, and 60-year-old Kai Li.
Swidan has been behind bars since the days of the Obama administration and the Republicans have said that the successive US administrations have shown no sense of urgency for their release.
The Texan Republicans said Swidan, who is also a Texan, should be released and Blinken’s trip will be the final opportunity to secure his release. “Your visit represents perhaps the final opportunity to end the injustice of Mr. Swidan’s imprisonment,” the two Republicans told Blinken in a letter.
“This has been an ongoing conversation with the PRC and something that for me is always at the top of my list, that is, looking out for the security and wellbeing of Americans around the world, including those who are being detained in one way or another, including arbitrarily,” Blinken was quoted as saying by CBS News. He refrained from naming any one particular prisoner.
The 48-year-old man was sentenced to death on charges of narcotics trafficking. In April 2023, a Jiangmen Intermediate Court denied his appeal and upheld the death penalty with a two-year suspended death sentence, CBS News said in a report.
A UN working group and the US has defended Swidan by saying that the charges against him are fabricated and that he was wrongfully detained. They claim that the charges are levelled against him from a time when he was not even in China and that no drugs were found to be in his possession or in his hotel room.
Meanwhile, Kai Li’s son told CBS News that he believes that a personal appeal from the US Secretary of State may help secure his father’s release. Li has been held in a Chinese prison since 2016 on arbitrary charges and is held in a very small cell with dozens of other prisoners.
Even though the US has negotiated prisoner swaps with Russia, China is proving to be a difficult terrain.
