China has used draconian surveillance law to suppress dissent: Report

China has used draconian surveillance laws to suppress dissent against the communist leadership in the country.

Tens of thousands appeared to have been detained in China, under "a systematised, and secret detention" policy, which allows authorities to keep anyone in jail for up to six months, The HK Post reported.

The rights group also called on Chinese leadership for misusing Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) to arbitrarily imprison people.

Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location is a form of detention regularly used by authorities in China against individuals accused of endangering state security, the report added.

The number includes well-known names like artist Ai Wei Wei and human rights lawyers Wang Yu, who were caught up in China's 2015 crackdown on rights defenders. Other foreigners and political detainees have also gone through RSDL, like a Swedish activist, and Canadian missionaries accused of espionage in 2014.

China Human Rights Defenders' William Nee said the use of the extrajudicial detention system has changed from an exception in its early days to a more widely used tool today.

"Before, when Ai Wei Wei was taken away, they had to make an excuse that it was really about his business, or a tax issue or something like that. So there's this trend, a decade or two ago, where they would use a pretence to detain someone when the real reason was their public participation or their political views," Nee was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera.

"There was a fear that [RSDL] was going to make it more routine 'legal,' given a veneer of legality and legitimacy to it. And I think that's been well borne out."

Anyone involved in "public affairs" including Party members and state employees are held in a similar parallel system known as liuzhi. An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people have been held in liuzhi each year, the Doha based publication reported citing the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights.

Conditions under these facilities have been described as tantamount to torture, and inmates are held without a right to legal counsel.

The HK Post, in its report, said RSDL are located throughout the country. Detainees are kept in a custom-built facility, a remodelled detention centre, in places located in Beijing, Tianjin, Shaanxi and Guangdong.

Submitted its new findings to a United Nations working group on arbitrary detention, rights experts, have called on China's government to end RSDL.

( With inputs from ANI )