Thread: Human Rights in China

July 31, 2009
Detentions Illustrate Limits of Free Speech in China
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — A woman and her two sisters who came to Beijing from southern China during the Paralympics last September to protest property seizures but were arrested have been sentenced to one year of detention for vandalism, the woman said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

The woman, Huang Liuhong, had already been held for nearly a year in a hotel — known as a black jail — while awaiting trial.

Ms. Huang was released from the hotel, the Lizhou Cement Factory Rest House, on July 17. She said she expected to remain under a form of house arrest for one year in her hometown, under police surveillance. The case is one of several that starkly illustrate how the Summer Olympics and the Paralympics in Beijing last year failed to expand freedom of speech in China, despite assertions by the international organizers of those games that the events would push the Chinese government toward more democratic policies.

Ms. Huang traveled with 10 others from the town of Liuzhou in Guangxi Province to Beijing last September to protest four cases of property seizure involving local officials. But after being interviewed by an American journalist, they were seized by plainclothes police officers who had followed them from Guangxi. Ms. Huang, two older sisters and their 79-year-old mother, all of whom had traveled to Beijing, were arrested.

The mother was soon released, but Ms. Huang and her infant son were kept for 314 days in a hotel in Liuzhou. Her two sisters were held in a detention center.

Ms. Huang said she and her sisters were not put on trial until June 19. The judge found them guilty of vandalism and sentenced them to one year in prison followed by two years of probation. The two older sisters were released July 14, Ms. Huang said, each having served almost the entire sentence under the verdict because of their time in the detention center.

Others from the group of 11 that came to Beijing were also put on trial.

After her release from the so-called black jail, Ms. Huang was given a week to visit her husband in the southern city of Shenzhen, where she is now. But she will have to return to Liuzhou and spend a year under a version of house arrest, during which she can live in her home and move around Liuzhou but not leave the town, she said.

“They said someone will be watching me,” she said.

The court in Liuzhou had no immediate comment on Thursday; copies of court documents provided by Ms. Huang showed that she had been found guilty of vandalism.

Ms. Huang said the police accused her of breaking the window of a police van after she was detained in Beijing. She said she never damaged the van.

During her nearly yearlong detention in the hotel, three police officers and three baby sitters were assigned to watch her and her son, she said. She was also monitored through a surveillance camera in the hotel room, she added. The cost to the government was in the thousands of dollars at least, she estimated.

The three sisters plan to appeal the verdict, Ms. Huang said, but such judgments are rarely reversed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/wo...gewanted=print

China police detain rights lawyer: legal group

By GILLIAN WONG (AP) – 8 hours ago

BEIJING — Rights groups urged China's government Thursday to disclose the whereabouts of a leading human rights lawyer who was detained by police in a dawn raid and has not been heard from since.

Xu Zhiyong, a Beijing-based legal scholar with the Gongmeng rights group, was taken from his home by police early Wednesday, the group said on its Web site. The group has since been unable to contact Xu and another staffer, Zhuang Lu.

The Beijing public security bureau refused to answer questions over the telephone and did not immediately respond to a faxed list of questions.

Xu's disappearance appears to be the latest in a string of moves Beijing has taken to restrain activist lawyers, who regularly run the risk of being detained, harassed, attacked and threatened with disbarment for their work. China is also preparing for the Communist state's 60th anniversary on Oct. 1 — a particularly sensitive period when dissent is not tolerated.

New York-based Human Rights Watch urged the Chinese government to disclose Xu's whereabouts, saying it was "gravely concerned" about the lawyer.

"That concern is due to the Chinese government's increasingly punitive approach to individuals such as Xu who are in the vanguard of China's domestic human rights movement," the group's Asia researcher, Phelim Kine, said in a statement.

Two weeks ago, Gongmeng's legal research arm was shut down and the licenses of more than 50 lawyers — many known for their politically sensitive human rights work — were revoked in what was likely one of China's most drastic moves to control the lawyers.

Gongmeng group lawyers say their legal center researched public welfare issues and offered legal aid. Most recently, they represented parents whose children became sick in a widespread scandal involving milk tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

The group, citing security guards at the compound where Xu lives in Beijing, said Xu was taken away by one police officer and five plainclothes police.

The group said Xu had arranged a Thursday hearing with the National Tax Bureau to discuss the bureau's recent decision to fine the research center 1.2 million yuan (US$175,000) for allegedly not paying taxes.

Authorities shut the center down July 17 apparently because it was not registered, but the lawyers say the legal center was a department of the Gongmeng group, which has proper registration.

"I don't know why Xu was taken away. I haven't received any notice from the Beijing police," said Gongmeng lawyer Teng Biao. "He hasn't done anything illegal."

The group had no further details on the other missing staffer, Zhuang.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The Associated Press: China police detain rights lawyer: legal group

August 10, 2009
Arrest in China Rattles Backers of Legal Rights
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — China’s nascent legal rights movement, already reeling from a crackdown on crusading lawyers, the kidnapping of defense witnesses and the shuttering of a prominent legal clinic, has been shaken by the detention of a widely respected rights defender who has been incommunicado since the police led him away from his apartment 12 days ago.

Xu Zhiyong, 36, a soft-spoken and politically shrewd legal scholar who has made a name representing migrant workers, death row inmates and the parents of babies poisoned by tainted milk, is accused of tax evasion. The accusation is almost universally seen here as a cover for his true offense: angering the Communist Party leadership through his advocacy of the rule of law.

If convicted, he could face up to seven years in prison.

“We’re all shocked by his detention, because Xu Zhiyong has always tried to avoid taking on radical and politically sensitive cases,” said Teng Biao, a colleague. “His only interest is fighting for the rights of the vulnerable and trying to enhance China’s legal system.”

Mr. Teng helped Mr. Xu establish the Open Constitution Initiative, a six-year-old nonprofit legal center that the authorities closed last month, charging that it was improperly registered and that it failed to pay taxes.

Mr. Xu is not the first rights advocate in China to face the wrath of the authorities in recent years. Gao Zhisheng, a vocal lawyer, vanished into police custody six months ago, and Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer, was beaten and then jailed after exposing abuses in China’s birth-control program.

Although rights lawyers and grass-roots social organizations have always been tightly controlled here, the pressure has intensified in recent weeks. More than 20 lawyers known for taking on politically tinged cases were effectively disbarred, and the police raided a group that works to ease discrimination against people with Hepatitis B.

Last week, China’s justice minister gave a speech saying lawyers should above all obey the Communist Party and help foster a harmonious society. To improve discipline, the minister said, all law firms in China would be sent party liaisons to “guide their work.”

But given Mr. Xu’s international stature and reputation for working within the law, legal scholars both in China and abroad say his prosecution suggests a new level of repression.

“What makes his detention particularly disturbing is that he’s a special figure in so many ways,” said Paul Gewirtz, director of the China Law Center at Yale Law School, which helped Mr. Xu establish his legal center, known here by its Chinese name, Gongmeng. “He’s at the forefront of advancing the rule of law, which is something everyone agrees China needs for its ongoing development.”

After 30 years of reform, China’s legal system is at a critical juncture. Law schools continue to pump out thousands of graduates each year, and the courts, even if imperfect, have increasingly become a forum for resolving disputes. Late last month the Supreme People’s Court announced reforms intended to markedly reduce executions.

But as lawyers here discover, there are limits to China’s embrace of judicial reform.

The Constitution, which includes guarantees of free speech and human rights, is unenforceable in court. Judges routinely ignore evidence, making determinations based on political considerations. And when it comes to vaguely defined offenses like “subversion of state power” or the invoking of “state secrets” laws, even the best-trained lawyers are powerless to defend the accused.

He Weifang, a law professor and legal adviser to Gongmeng, said conservative forces in the Communist Party were increasingly wary of lawyers, who they suspect are ultimately seeking to challenge one-party rule. Their greatest fear, Mr. He said, is that advocacy lawyers and civil society organizations could one day lead a pro-democracy movement among the poor and disenfranchised citizens they represent.

“What the authorities don’t appreciate, though, is that lawyers are leading these people to the courts, where their complaints can be resolved by rule of law,” he said. “People like Xu Zhiyong can only help the government solve some of the problems it faces.”

According to Gongmeng, Mr. Xu is being held at the Beijing No. 1 Detention Center, although public security officials have not confirmed that he is in their custody. Peng Jian, a lawyer who is advising Gongmeng, said the authorities had imposed a $208,000 penalty for nonpayment of taxes due on funds received from Yale for cooperative research projects.

A day after the raid on Gongmeng’s office, Mr. Xu held a news conference to say that the accusations were baseless. He described the attack on his research center as a battle between corrupt officials and society’s most vulnerable citizens. “We believe conscience will surely triumph over the evil forces,” he said.

A week later, police officers came to his door and led him away. Another employee of the research center, Zhuang Lu, was also taken away the same day.

Soon after graduating from Peking University law school, Mr. Xu became immersed in the case of a graphic artist who was beaten to death in 2003 in police custody in the southern city of Guangzhou. The artist, Sun Zhigang, 27, had been arrested under vagrancy laws that allowed the police to detain people for traveling outside their registered hometowns without a permit.

Mr. Xu led a campaign to end the practice, which gained widespread media attention. A few months later, the State Council abolished the system.

That same year Mr. Xu rose to the defense of a muckraking editor jailed in Guangzhou after his newspaper, Southern Metropolis, ran a series of articles about Mr. Sun’s death. The editor, Cheng Yizhong, said Mr. Xu helped rally lawyers and journalists, leading to his release five months later. “Only Xu had the courage to take on my case,” he said.

More recently, he was preparing a challenge to black jails, the illegal holding cells that some officials use to silence persistent critics. Last year, friends say, he was roughed up several times while gathering evidence from petitioners who had come to Beijing to press their grievances to the central government.

Although he was less outspoken than some other rights activists, Mr. Xu did not shy away from cases that were bound to upset China’s power elite. Last May Gongmeng published a study challenging the official verdict that blames the Dalai Lama for the 2008 riots in Tibet. The report, disseminated online and sent to government leaders, said legitimate grievances born from failed government policies were largely responsible for the unrest.

Raised in a Christian home in Henan Province, Mr. Xu was fond of noting his birth in a county called Minquan, which translates as “civil rights.” In an interview last year with The Economic Observer, a Chinese weekly, he said this had a profound impact on his social consciousness.

“I strive to be a worthy Chinese citizen, a member of the group of people who promote the progress of the nation,” he said. “I want to make people believe in ideals and justice, and help them see the hope of change.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/wo...gewanted=print

August 25, 2009
Books of The Times
Survivors’ Stories From China
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
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WOMAN FROM SHANGHAI

Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp

By Xianhui Yang

Translated by Wen Huang. 302 pages. Pantheon Books. $24.95.

One of the most curious forms of tourism in recent years has to be that of Chinese who travel to North Korea for the nostalgic gag of visiting a country that abounds in echoes of their past.

Stories from these travelers typically focus on things like material poverty and a kind of totalitarian kitsch: the proliferation of statues and other symbols of a revered absolute leader, the spartan uniformity of dress, big state-owned stores bereft of goods to sell, broad avenues manned by traffic cops gifted in mechanized gyrations but missing that other basic ingredient of traffic, cars.

I have spoken with many of these Chinese travelers and have always been struck by how seldom their accounts dwell on the stark human costs of a system like North Korea’s, or on the political system that makes such extreme repression and deprivation possible on a national scale.

Xianhui Yang’s “Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp,” a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher calls “fact-based fiction,” is about what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. Reading it, one begins to appreciate why travelers to North Korea are so reluctant to reflect on human suffering: the reality of North Korea today is too painfully close to a situation endured by the Chinese well within living memory. As the circumstances of the publication of “Woman From Shanghai” help us understand, these are memories that the Chinese state still works hard to suppress.

Mr. Yang’s stories, which he painstakingly collected over a three-year period a decade ago, are those of people branded by the Chinese state as “rightists” in the late 1950s and sent to Jiabiangou, a notorious camp for “re-education through labor” in the northwestern desert wastelands of Gansu Province. In his introduction the translator, Wen Huang, explains that the camp, which was originally built to hold 40 or 50 criminals, came to hold roughly 3,000 political prisoners between 1957 and 1961. All but 500 of them would perish there, mostly of starvation.

When word of the soaring death toll reached the capital, Beijing began an investigation. In October 1961 the government ordered Jiabiangou closed and then mounted an exhaustive cover-up. After it was shuttered, a doctor who was assigned to the camp spent six months fabricating the medical records of every inmate. In letters to family members, the cause of death was attributed to all manner of illness except starvation, a word that was never mentioned.

Though less well known in the West than two other immense political disasters visited upon the Chinese people by Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the so-called Anti-Rightist Movement to which the subjects of Mr. Yang’s stories fell victim remains difficult to research because of continuing censorship. Chinese historians say this is partly because of the central role in these ideological purges played by Mao’s much revered successor, Deng Xiaoping, credited today with putting the country on the path of economic liberalization.

Mr. Yang first encountered stories of Jiabiangou’s horrors as a self-described idealistic youth working on a collective farm in the 1960s, and though he was unbelieving at first, they stuck with him. Years later, when he was denied access to archives from this period and when queries to the government on the subject of Jiabiangou went unanswered, his research turned to what he calls China’s human archives: living people and their oral histories.

In this regard, “Woman From Shanghai” represents a remarkable contribution to a growing literature based on personal histories. Mr. Huang, the translator, has played an important role in bringing such work to an English-language audience, having recently translated a work by a giant in this budding field: “The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up,” by the muckraking Sichuan journalist Liao Yiwu.

Readers of Mr. Yang’s book should not be put off by the frequent recurrence of common elements in these stories: the exposure to bitter cold; hunger so intense as to cause inmates to eat human flesh; the familiar sequence of symptoms, beginning with edema, that lead down the path to death; the toolbox of common survivor techniques, from toadyism to betrayal, from stealthy theft to making use of the vestiges of privilege, which survived even incarceration in this era of radical egalitarianism. It is through the accumulation and indeed repetition of such things that this utterly convincing portrait of a society driven far off the rails is drawn.

In one story, a man without medical training who is pressed into service as a camp doctor relates his dismay at watching a starving patient die when the one available remedy for the critically ill, glucose injections, fails. “Don’t blame yourself,” a real doctor tells him. “It was not your fault. We had brought him back to life twice already. His time had come. Nobody could have saved him.”

The stories contain no sugarcoating and are frequently grim in theme, and yet here and there one encounters the stubborn persistence of humanity’s best qualities. In the title story, a young woman travels to the labor camp to visit her husband, only to learn from reluctant fellow inmates that he has just died. In the face of threats from the camp authorities, she collects his remains from a shallow grave and carries them home for proper burial.

Most moving of all, perhaps, is “The Love Story of Li Xiangnian,” about the persecution of a young man and the persistence of his ardor for his girlfriend. The haggard Li escapes from detention to be reunited with her, only to be arrested again. Their touching reunion many years later, after the woman is married, would not be out of place in a Gabriel García Márquez novel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/bo...gewanted=print

China 'running illegal prisons'
By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing

Alleged black jail victim waits to talk to police in Beijing
Former inmates claim they were beaten and raped in the jails

China is running a number of unlawful detention centres in which its citizens can be kept for months, according to campaign group Human Rights Watch.

It says these centres - known as black jails - are often in state-run hotels, nursing homes or psychiatric hospitals.

Among those detained are ordinary people who have travelled to Beijing to report local injustices.

The government has denied black jails are used, despite previous reports in state-run media on their existence.

'Punched and kicked'

The human rights group report, entitled An Alleyway in Hell, says ordinary people are often abducted off the streets and taken to illegal detention centres.

They are sometimes stripped of their possessions, beaten and given no information about why they have been detained.

Human Rights Watch said it collected information for the report by interviewing 38 detainees earlier this year.

"I asked why they were detaining me, and as a group [the guards] came in and punched and kicked me and said they wanted to kill me," one former detainee told the group.
Inmates in a Chinese prison
Legal detention centres have also come in for criticism

"I loudly cried for help and they stopped, but from then on, I didn't dare [risk another beating]."

Many of those held are petitioners, people who travel to Beijing to present their complaints to the State Bureau for Letters and Calls.

This national government department is supposed to help ordinary people across the country redress their grievances.

But some petitioners are detained by plain clothes security officers when they arrive in Beijing.

The Human Rights Watch report cites unpublished local government documents to provide details on the economic structure underpinning the jails.

It says penalties are levied against local officials "who fail to take decisive action when petitioners from their geographical area seek legal redress in provincial capitals and Beijing".

The operators of the black jails receive cash payments of 150 yuan ($22; £13) to 200 yuan per person, "creating another incentive to employ forms of illegal detention", the report says.

"The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government's rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

Outcry over deaths

State-run media outlets have already reported the existence of black jails.

The China Daily last week carried a report about the trial of a black jail guard accused of raping a 20-year-old woman who had been detained.

Despite that, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Thursday denied that China had illegal detention centres.

"I can assure you that there are no so-called black jails in China," he said at a regular news briefing.

But when pressed on the issue he added that there were "existing problems" that were being dealt with.

Black jails are just one aspect of China's detention system that have come in for criticism over recent months.

There has been a public outcry over the numbers of deaths in prisons and detention centres, a situation the government has promised to stamp out.
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China 'running illegal prisons'

November 13, 2009

Group Accuses China of Abuses in Secret Jails

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — A human rights group accused China’s national government on Thursday of tolerating an extensive network of secret jails operated in Beijing by provincial and municipal governments to prevent their citizens from complaining to national officials.

In a report released in Hong Kong and based on interviews with 38 former detainees from so-called black jails, Human Rights Watch accused guards at these prisons of beating, sexually abusing, intimidating and robbing men, women and teenagers.

The former detainees had gone to Beijing to submit petitions to the national government after suffering what they described as corruption or other abuses of power at lower levels of government.

Provincial and municipal officials in China are subject to a national civil service evaluation system in which they are penalized based on the number of complaints received in Beijing about their management. So local and provincial officials have a strong incentive to prevent petitioners from reaching the central government.

Jeffrey Bader, the National Security Council director for East Asian affairs, said in a conference call with reporters on Monday that President Obama planned to raise a series of human rights issues with President Hu Jintao when they meet next week in Beijing. While Mr. Bader did not mention unofficial jails, he did say that President Obama would discuss “rule of law,” a broad category that encompasses unofficial jails and a wide range of other extrajudicial practices in China.

Sophie Richardson, the advocacy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch, said that abuses were widespread in China’s prison system, which operates under some judicial supervision, but that they were worse in unofficial jails.

“We’re talking about a country with torture in formal detention centers, and the black jails are 10 floors down” in terms of the treatment of detainees, she said.

Chinese news outlets have reported on the existence of unofficial jails, but central government officials have denied their existence at news conferences.

“There are no black jails in China,” Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Beijing on Thursday. “If citizens have complaints and suggestions about government work, they can convey them to the relevant authorities through legitimate and normal channels.”

A call to the press office of the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing on Thursday was transferred repeatedly by officials who said that the subject was not in their area of responsibility. The call was finally transferred to a spokesman who declined to give his name and said that he was not aware of any black jails.

China has taken some steps in recent months to safeguard the legal rights of those who run afoul of the authorities. New regulations drafted by the Ministry of Public Security and released on Monday by the State Council, or cabinet, bar forced labor at government-authorized detention centers, where people accused of crimes are held before trial.

The new rules also ban officials at detention centers from charging detainees for expenses like food, which must now be paid for by the government.

But Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that the new rules did nothing to help detainees at unofficial jails, because they apply only to people who are within the judicial system.

Government-approved detention centers were at the center of a series of scandals earlier this year. Li Qiaoming, 24, died at one of these centers in Yunnan Province last February in an incident that local authorities initially blamed on an accident during a game of hide and seek; public criticism prompted an investigation by the central government that determined that Mr. Li was beaten to death.

But unofficial jails have captured more attention in recent months.

According to Chinese media, a guard at an unofficial jail pleaded guilty on Nov. 4 to raping a 21-year-old woman from Anhui Province who had come to Beijing to complain about harassment at her university. Nearly a dozen people reportedly witnessed the rape, and about 50 detainees, including the young woman, managed to break out of the unofficial jail when the guard fled after the rape.

The court dismissed other charges against the inexpensive guesthouse that was being used as the unofficial jail and against two provincial liaison officials, according to the official China Daily newspaper.

Human Rights Watch called for the Chinese government to eliminate black jails. The group, based in New York, also asked that the United States, European Union, World Bank and the Asian Development Bank — which have been trying to help China upgrade its legal system — all seek the abolition of black jails.

The Asian Development Bank said that it was not involved in human rights.

“The A.D.B. is an apolitical organization, and our charter mandates that A.D.B. does not interfere in the political affairs of any of its member countries and that only economic considerations shall be relevant to its decisions,” the bank said in an e-mail reply to questions. “We regard the issue of human rights as being political in nature.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/wo..._r=1&ref=world

Looks like old habits die hard.