'From hell to limbo': Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig describes more than a thousand days as China's prisoner

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Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who was held in China for nearly three years [told] about the interrogation he endured during his six months in solitary confinement.

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"They are trying to bully and torment and terrorize and coerce you … into accepting their false version of reality, in which you're guilty.

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On December 14 [2018], four days after he was taken into custody [in China], Kovrig got his first consular visit with Canada's then-ambassador John McCallum and another official from the embassy an an offsite location.

Kovrig said he remembers trying, in that meeting and others, to communicate that China was violating international law by interrogating him the way they were.

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He said his food rations were cut for being uncooperative. He said that during interrogations he was put in a high-backed wooden chair and restrained, forbidden from crossing his legs or changing his position.

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[Kovrig and Michael Spavor, another Canadian who had also been detained but was being held separately] had been illegally detained by China in apparent retaliation for the Vancouver arrest of Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who was detained at the behest of the U.S. to face fraud charges related to American sanctions against Iran.

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Kovrig's partner [who was pregnant at the time when he was detained] had played their daughter recordings of his voice and showed pictures of her father while he was locked up on the other side of the world. Their daughter was two-and-a-half years old when he finally arrived back in Canada.

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