New Zealand’s Supreme Court on Wednesday handed down a landmark ruling that would allow the government to export an accused murderer to Communist China for trial.
New Zealand suspended extradition to Hong Kong in 2020 and has never before granted an extradition demand from the government in Beijing.
The subject of the controversial ruling is Kyung Yup Kim, accused of the 2009 murder of a 20-year-old woman named Chen Peiyun in Shanghai.
Kim, born in Korea but holding permanent residency in New Zealand, was visiting his girlfriend in Shanghai at the time. The victim was a waitress and sex worker found bludgeoned and strangled in a desolate area near the city.
Chinese police said they found forensic evidence linking Kim to the crime, plus testimony from a friend who said Kim admitted he could have “beaten a prostitute to death.”
Kim was arrested in New Zealand in 2011, jailed for five years, and granted limited freedom with electronic monitoring for three years after that — a record-breaking term of incarceration without trial for New Zealand. He maintains he is innocent and accuses his Shanghai girlfriend of committing the murder. His defense lawyers say the girlfriend used her Chinese Communist Party connections to pin the killing on Kim.
Lower courts have blocked China’s previous extradition requests on the grounds that China’s authoritarian legal system cannot guarantee a fair trial and Chinese prisoners face a high risk of torture. On Wednesday, the New Zealand Supreme Court ruled 3-2 that Chinese officials have provided sufficient assurances that Kim will receive a fair trial and will not be abused in prison.
“The assumption that diplomatic assurances from the PRC [People’s Republic of China] can be a sound basis for extradition is deeply concerning. This is the same PRC which is assuring the world that the allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang are fabrications, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary,” Dr. Anna High of Otago University told the UK Guardian.
“There are grave and well-documented problems with China’s criminal justice system – the idea that a diplomatic promise is a sufficient basis for surrendering someone into that system seems, at best, incredibly naïve,” High said.
Michael Caster, co-founder of the Safeguard Defenders human rights group, told the Financial Times he feared other countries might follow the New Zealand precedent and begin extraditing prisoners to the brutal Chinese regime.
“The court has not done their homework, they have not been swayed by the reality of China’s consistent trend of violating diplomatic assurances and consular agreements. In case after case, the requirement that China grants consular access has been ignored or flatly rejected,” Caster said.
“It’s a very backward decision for international human rights law, and the Chinese will now be able to use this as a precedent to extradite economic criminals,” Kim’s barrister Tony Ellis said, echoing Caster’s warning.
“Ellis suggested New Zealand’s heavy economic reliance on China might have influenced the minister’s decision to extradite Kim. More than a quarter of New Zealand’s exports go to China,” the Financial Times observed.
Kim’s lawyers said they would file a complaint with the U.N. Human Rights Commission to block the extradition, and if that failed, they would ask for another New Zealand judicial review based on Kim’s poor health, which includes liver and kidney disease plus a brain tumor.
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