Amnesty International Demands Protection for Activist Trapped in U.K. over ‘Fake’ Bomb Threat to Chinese Embassy

Amnesty International (AI) on Wednesday asked Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong to intervene on behalf of human rights activist Drew Pavlou, a 23-year-old Australian national arrested in London for allegedly emailing a bomb threat to the Chinese Embassy.

Pavlou said the email is an obvious fake, concocted by the regime in Beijing or its supporters to harass him for speaking out against the Uyghur genocide. His attorney has directly accused the Chinese government of fabricating the threat.

Pavlou, a former student activist at the University of Queensland who formed his own political party and ran unsuccessfully for the Australian Senate this year, is an outspoken critic of China’s human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans, and other oppressed groups.

Pavlou has been targeted for threats and violence by supporters of the Chinese Communist regime on several occasions, most infamously during his Senate campaign in May, when he was assaulted by Chinese nationalists in Sydney for marching on behalf of the Uyghurs while carrying a sign that read “Fuck Xi Jinping.” Xi is the authoritarian ruler of China.

An outraged Pavlou reported that he was investigated by the New South Wales police for supposedly provoking his own assault by insulting the Chinese dictator. On another occasion in May, he was detained by Australian police and fined for holding up a blank piece of paper outside the Chinese consulate, supposedly because it caused “anxiety to the public.”

Pavlou was arrested over the weekend in London, which he visited to protest the Chinese government at the Wimbledon tennis event. He was violently expelled from the Wimbledon men’s championship match after displaying a banner that referenced Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis champion who vanished for weeks and returned with new programming after she dared to accuse a senior Chinese Communist Party official of raping her. 

Wimbledon apparently caved to pressure from the Chinese regime and banned references to Peng from this year’s tournament, to the outrage of numerous tennis stars and human rights activists.

Pavlou took his “small, peaceful human rights protest” to the Chinese Embassy in London, where he told the UK Guardian he contemplated gluing his hand to the wall, a new trend among activists.

The Chinese Embassy then sicced London police on Pavlou by claiming he sent them an email reading, “This is Drew Pavlou. Today I will blow up the Embassy for Uyghurs. Regards, Drew.” 

The email originated from an unfamiliar address Pavlou said he does not control. His lawyer accused the “Chinese state” of sending the message to itself in order to frame Pavlou, a tactic China has used to suppress dissidents before. 

Pavlou reported a subsequent flood of threatening emails and voice messages from Chinese Communist Party “operatives” and “supporters,” many of them sent from email addresses designed to spoof his own. He noted that fake emails sent under his name have been received by fellow human rights activists, a detail confirmed by the Guardian.

“They still won’t drop the bomb threat case and won’t let me leave [the] U.K.,” he said of the London police.

“Activists pay a heavy price for speaking up against the Chinese government’s human rights abuses,” AI remarked when asking Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong to look after Pavlou’s “well-being” while he remains trapped in London.

“Framing peaceful protests as threats to national security and sending fake emails are common tactics used by the Chinese government against Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kongers,” AI noted.

“We urge the Australian government to offer Mr. Pavlou every assistance for his safe return to Australia as quickly as possible and ensure his fundamental rights are protected, particularly given the claims made about how he was treated during the arrest and detention,” AI said.