China has prevented increasing numbers of people from leaving the country as part of efforts to tighten controls under President Xi Jinping, a human rights group said on Tuesday.
Since 2018, Beijing has passed five new or amended laws expanding its ability to impose so-called exit bans, bringing the total to 15, according to Madrid-based rights group Safeguard Defenders.
“Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, China has expanded the legal landscape for exit bans and increasingly used them, sometimes outside legal justification,” the group said in a report.
Between 2016 and 2020, there was an eight-fold increase in the number of cases where exit bans were mentioned in the Chinese Supreme Court’s legal database, the report said.
“Exit bans have become one of the many tools used by the Chinese Communist Party as part of broad efforts to tighten control over all aspects of people’s lives,” it added.
Read more: