"Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence."
Yet in Xi Jinping's China, these words have been mutilated into a hollow incantation—ritually invoked in the Chinese Communist Party press releases even as the regime tramples them underfoot.
Consider the so-called "criminal procedure" applied to investigative volunteers who collected public information about pandemic deaths. Without warning, plainclothes security agents stormed their apartments, seized their computers, and disappeared them into secret detention sites. For months, no charges were announced, no lawyers permitted. The only evidence of their existence was a fleeting state media bulletin declaring them "confessed criminals", conveniently issued before any trial had occurred. Their families were left to guess whether they were even alive. The presumption of innocence was annihilated the instant they were deemed politically inconvenient.
Or take the young labor advocates who dared to document abuses in China's southern factories. They were abducted without warrants, interrogated in "residential surveillance" cells, and threatened with indefinite imprisonment if they refused to sign false confessions. Their "trials" were closed-door rituals, verdicts pre-written by the CCP committees. Their guilt was assumed not because of proof but because Xi Jinping's paranoid apparatus requires perpetual enemies to justify its existence.
This is no accident. Xi Jinping's regime has institutionalized guilt by association, guilt by suspicion, guilt by rumor. The very notion of proof has been reduced to an absurdity. If the CCP accuses you, you are guilty. If you deny it, you are guilty of resisting the CCP. If you demand a lawyer, you are guilty of defying the state. Each stage of the process is a grotesque parody: police fabricate evidence, prosecutors rubber-stamp charges, judges recite verdicts as if reading a grocery list. This is not justice. It is political theater designed to terrorize a population into submission.
One need only look at the mass campaigns against citizen bloggers who questioned local cover-ups, or university researchers who exposed corrupt land grabs. They were not radicals. They were not saboteurs. Their only "crime" was daring to speak facts that contradicted the official narrative. Yet they were detained incommunicado, their fates decided by secret tribunals before any trial was convened. Their families were issued stern warnings: Do not speak to foreign media, or you will be next.
Xi Jinping's autocracy has elevated this practice to the core principle of his rule: the destruction of every safeguard that might restrain his power. Under this system, Article 11's promise is not just violated—it is inverted. Innocence is a liability. Due process is a fiction. The courtroom is a stage where the CCP performs its omnipotence, not a forum where evidence is weighed or truth established.
This is why the presumption of innocence matters. It is not some abstract legal technicality. It is the only barrier standing between ordinary people and the whims of despots. It is the line that separates civilization from tyranny. And Xi Jinping has obliterated it with a cold, methodical precision that should chill any observer to the bone.
Under his dictatorship, the Chinese people are forced to live with the unspoken knowledge that any accusation—no matter how preposterous—can become a death sentence for their freedom. This is the CCP-sponsored psychological warfare against an entire nation.
The world must recognize Xi Jinping's charade for what it is: an elaborate, meticulously engineered assault on the most basic human rights. No regime that builds its power on presumed guilt deserves the pretense of legitimacy. It deserves only unrelenting condemnation—and the unwavering solidarity of those who still believe that no man, no matter how powerful, has the right to bury the truth under a mountain of lies.
