The Chinese government imposed arbitrary restrictions on people’s internationally protected right to leave the country

Beijing: The Chinese government has been arbitrarily restricting people’s freedom to leave the country, which is guaranteed by international law.

When applying for a passport, Chinese authorities require individuals from regions they often consider to be at high risk of online fraud or “illegal” departure to submit additional evidence and get clearance from many government departments, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation.

Those who do not achieve these burdensome requirements are often denied passports. The government has long barred citizens from obtaining passports in areas where Tibetans and Uyghurs make up the majority population.

Human Rights Watch Associate China Director Maya Wang said, “Although many Chinese citizens enjoy traveling abroad, the right to leave China appears to be restricted for growing categories of people throughout the country.”

“The authorities are going beyond existing restrictions on Tibetans and Uyghurs to limit the travel of people throughout China under the guise of anti-crime campaigns,” Maya Wang told Human Rights Watch.

The Ministry of Public Security’s Entry and Exit Administration, which oversees passport issuing, introduced a new “on-demand” system in late 2002 to expedite the passport application process, according to the HRW study. In China, this method has been expanded to almost every region. However, the accelerated passport application procedure was never made available in Xinjiang, Tibet, or the 13 Tibetan or Hui autonomous prefectures in the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan.

According to the HRW report, applicants from these regions of China are required to submit much more thorough documentation with their passport applications than those from other regions, and they usually have to wait a long time—often years—before their applications are approved or are routinely denied without a good reason.

According to the HRW study, all previously issued passports were seized by Xinjiang officials in 2016. Human Rights Watch claims that these values are not upheld by Chinese legislation that allow the government to place severe limitations on people’ ability to travel abroad on the basis of vague national security arguments.

“Growing restrictions on the right to obtain passports have raised anxiety that Xi Jinping’s government is restoring practices from when few people could travel abroad,” Wang said. “Chinese authorities should drop these arbitrary and discriminatory practices so that everyone has the equal right to leave the country,” Wang told Human Rights Watch.