The case of a Chinese refugee who swallowed razor blades to prevent his deportation back to Mainland China has raised concerns over the recently signed Australia-China Extradition Treaty.
The man, who has been in Australia for 10 years and in detention for the last four, had his business visa cancelled on the grounds of an arrest warrant for kidnapping and murder committed in China.
Refugee groups say the warrant is dodgy and the Chinese legal system cannot be trusted.
Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett said that while the man is not being extradited, it does raise concerns about the efficacy of China's legal system in light of the recent Australia-China Extradition Treaty.
The treaty was signed during Chinese leader Hu Jintao's visit to Australia for APEC as part of a general agreement on international crime co-operation.
"The Extradition Treaty is an important issue," Senator Bartlett told The Epoch Times, particularly when looking at the "result of visa cancellations based on a dodgy arrest warrant".
Pamela Curr, campaign director for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), said the Chinese refugee, known as "DP" to protect his identity, was being sent back to China on the basis of an arrest warrant that would not be considered in an Australian court.
The warrant was unsigned and undated she said and, apart from name and region, was without any other corresponding data including date of birth, address, occupation or educational level.
While the name and region listed on the warrant were the same, Ms Curr said the region was large and the man's family name was the fourth most common name in China.
"The department is preparing to send DP back to possible execution when there is no evidence that DP is the man wanted by the Chinese [regime] for a serious crime," she said.
While The Australian Extradition Act 1988 clearly stipulates that there will be no extradition in cases that attract the death penalty, DP's case raises concerns about the treaty with China, where the level of corruption is high and regard for rule of law is low.
Nicholas Bequelin, an Asia-Pacific researcher for Human Rights Watch, says the Chinese legal system is "woefully inadequate" as it lacks independence from the [regime] and "exacerbates, rather than alleviates, local corruption".
The growing "mafia-isation" of local governments and the legal system's inability to address citizens' concerns attest to the urgent need for reform, Mr Bequelin said. However, there are no signs that Beijing is heading in that direction.
"In fact, under President Hu, the Party has abandoned its rule-of-law rhetoric to talk more about a "socialist" rule of law – implying that the Party, not the law itself, remains supreme," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
The Australian Government is not blind to the nature of governance in China. A specific restriction has been added to its China treaty that exempts from extradition any requisition "made with a view to try or punish him for an offence of a political character".
Senator Bartlett says the treaty must go before Parliament and then to the Joint Standing Committee before it is approved. It was important for concerns to be raised through this process, he said.
"The real concern is that they [the Chinese regime] will just charge people with all sorts of serious offences, which would just be another way of getting to people," he said.
Rowan Callick, The Australian's correspondent in Beijing, reported late last year that, in the lead-up to the Olympics, China's authoritarian rulers were increasingly wielding the law in an effort to gag dissidents.
"An increasing feature of the relentless intimidation of lawyers and journalists has been the use of closed trials, manoeuvres to block legal representation, trumped-up charges and coincidental attacks by thugs who are never caught or prosecuted," he wrote.
Mr Callick cited a number of human rights activists who had been detained under trumped-up charges, including award-winning human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng and researcher for The New York Times, Zhao Yan.
Ironically, one of China's best known environmental protection workers, Wu Lihong, has also been arrested, despite all the climate change hype surrounding APEC.
According to friends and supporters, Mr Wu was arrested and jailed for trumped-up extortion charges because he continued to campaign about official inaction in addressing the once beautiful, but now polluted, Lake Tai, the Australian Financial Review reported.