In a drill a protester confronting security forces in the troubled Xinjiang province in China
BEIJING -- Convictions for state security crimes including "violent terrorism" nearly doubled in 2015, figures from mainland China's top court showed Sunday, following a "strike hard" campaign to quell unrest in the largely Muslim region of Xinjiang and crackdowns on civil society.
Mainland courts convicted 1,419 on charges related to "endangering national security and violent terrorism" in 2015, Zhou Qiang, head of the mainland Supreme People's Court, said in a report to the annual session of the Chinese Communist Party-controlled (CCP) National People's Congress (NPC).
Last year, the country reported that its courts had convicted 712 on broadly similar charges of "violent terrorist attacks" and "splittism"— attempts to advocate independence for regions of China.
The national security convictions occurred as the courts "actively took part in anti-terror, anti-separatist and anti-cult struggles," Zhou said.
Human Rights Activists Convicted
Mainland courts sentenced 1,084 people for "violent terrorist crimes" and another 335 for other crimes related to "endangering national security."
The report did not detail crimes included in the second category, but Chinese legal expert Susan Finder said that "if you look at the list of national security crimes, human rights activists would have been convicted of some of them."
Mainland China aggressively increased pressure on civil society last year, carrying out mass detentions of civil rights lawyers and campaigners.
The moves came as the country passed a new national security law that experts feared would expand the mainland authorities' power to prosecute political dissidents.