Here's a link to the web site of Human Rights in China,which describes itself as "an international, Chinese, non-governmental organization with a mission to promote international human rights and advance the institutional protection of these rights in the People’s Republic of China (China). HRIC’s board and staff include Chinese, North American, and European individuals devoted to fostering greater space for democratic reforms and social justice."
According to the Los Angeles Times, human rights activists have been trying to drum up opposition to the Chinese governnment's Olympics float in the Tournament of Roses parade, but they haven't had much luck. Chinese Americans in LA seem disinterested, if not outright hostile, to the protest:
"We haven't talked about it," said Cat Chao, host of a popular Mandarin-language talk show on KAZN-AM (1300), about the Olympics float. "The majority of Chinese think the Olympics is bigger than human rights and that human rights are already improving. They'd rather see China improve on issues like pollution."
Philip Young, president of the local Chinese American Citizens Alliance, said he planned to attend the Rose Parade. But he'll be there to cheer his teenage son and daughter in the Arcadia High School marching band, not to applaud or dismiss the Beijing float.
"China needs to improve its human rights record like any country, but to pick the Rose Parade as the forum is inappropriate," Young said.
"I'm really turned off. As a Chinese American, I'm proud China is having the Olympics. It's their coming-out party. After 20, 30 years of economic improvement, it's sad that some still see China as a threat and not an opportunity," he said.
I'm really disappointed to hear somebody say that the Olympics are more important than human rights. It was that sort of thinking that led the U.S. Olympic Committee to keep a Jewish runner out of the Berlin Olympics in 1936, so as not to offend the Nazis.
Voice of America is reporting that China has a new labor law, which ostensibly protects workers against abuses:
A new labor law intended to improve the rights of Chinese workers has taken effect.
China's parliament, the National People's Congress, passed the law last June amid complaints of unpaid wages, forced labor and other abuses. The move came after 18 months of deliberation, public debate and allegations that business groups were trying to erode workers rights.
The law, which went into effect Tuesday, aims to improve protection for employees' legal rights, and toughen punishments for government officials who abuse their office.
Some business owners, however, say the new law will raise costs.
Some Chinese companies have been terminating contracts and asking employees to resign ahead of the law's introduction.
The law includes measures that set standards for wages, mandatory contracts and severance pay.
Foreign chambers of commerce and labor activists gave the law's passage a cautious welcome in June, voicing skepticism over its implementation.
The U.S.-based labor rights group, Global Labor Strategies, criticized what it said were efforts by the U.S.-China Business Council and U.S. corporations to weaken the legislation.
The business group denied that it was lobbying against the law, but acknowledged submitting comments to legislators. The council said better enforcement of existing labor laws will solve many of the problems the measure aimed to address.
Here's an analysis of the human rights situation in China by Human Rights Watch, an international organization. It appears to be circa 2005, but it's still worth reading to learn about some of the basic issues, which I don't think have changed significantly.
China While many governments have praised recent developments in China, the country remains a one-party state that does not hold national elections, has no independent judiciary, leads the world in executions, aggressively censors the Internet, bans independent trade unions, and represses minorities such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongolians.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still has not come to terms with the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, refusing to publish information about the number of persons killed, injured, “disappeared,” or arrested or to admit that the attack on peaceful protestors was a mistake.
In spite of its socialist roots, China faces serious challenges stemming from growing disparities between rich and poor, and urban and rural populations. Along with official corruption, such disparities in 2005 fueled a rise in protests and demonstrations from workers, farmers, people forcibly evicted from their homes, victims of police abuse, and HIV/AIDS activists, among others. According to official figures, there were seventy-four thousand protests in China in 2004 involving 3.5 million people, up from fifty-eight thousand protests in 2003. China’s leaders’ preoccupation with social stability has increased accordingly.
Government and CCP leaders have responded to the increasing social mobilization with a multi-faceted crackdown on demonstrators and their allies and with repression of means for disseminating information and organizing protests, particularly the Internet. Apprehension that so-called hostile foreign forces are bent on destabilizing China has led authorities to censor incoming and outgoing news and personal communications across borders and to impose long prison sentences on academics, intellectuals, and journalists for expressing political opinions challenging official views. Plans by some officials to ease regulations and give more room to civil society, including grassroots groups, appear to have been shelved.
There has been some progress. In March 2004, China amended its constitution to read "The State respects and protects human rights." Although the constitution is not directly enforceable, the amendment does offer some hope that human rights will be legally protected. The term human rights has now made its way into common discourse in China.
China’s Legal System New laws and regulations in 2005 detailing the parameters of permitted religious activities and limiting the formation of news organizations are the latest manifestations of China’s ongoing attempt to position itself as a society ruled by law. Although improvements in some areas, particularly in commercial law, are noticeable, judicial processes are still compromised by political interference, reliance on coerced confessions, legal procedures weighted in favor of the state, closed trials, and administrative sentencing.
Convictions on charges of “subversion” and of “leaking state secrets” continue to result from vaguely-worded state security and state secrets laws. Shi Tao, an established journalist, was sentenced to a ten-year prison term in April 2005 for “leaking state secrets abroad.” The secret was a directive banning journalists from reporting on the presence of overseas dissidents seeking to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. In September, Zheng Yichun was sentenced to a seven-year prison term for “incitement to subversion.” Evidence included articles he had written for foreign publications and websites and for his association with the Epoch Times, a publication allied with Falungong, a spiritual group banned in China as a cult.
Plans to revise China’s Criminal Procedure Law proceeded slowly in 2005. Long-discussed proposals to add a judicial component to reeducation through labor regulations appear to have stalled.
Restrictions on Freedom of Expression Critics have labeled China’s ever more sophisticated system of controls on the Internet the “Great Firewall of China.” More than sixty individuals were imprisoned at this writing for peaceful expression over the Internet.
In early January 2005, the head of the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee signaled that controls over publishing, the Internet, and short messaging systems (SMS) would be significantly tightened to ensure social stability. In September, the Ministry of Information Industry and the State Council introduced new regulations on Internet news which prevent distribution of any uncensored version of a news event or commentary. Internet portals, e-mail systems, and SMS were all affected.
More than 103 million Internet users face sophisticated filters, registration of all personal domestic websites, and personal responsibility for all content. The government closes websites without warning. In October, two Mongolian sites and Yannan, which tracked a rural protest, were shut down.
Internet café users, after presenting identification, are issued user numbers which make it easy to track their web use. In February, education officials cut off hundreds of thousands of users by decreeing that only enrolled, on-site college students, using their real names, could access university Internet message boards.
In an increasing number of instances, global Internet companies have been complicit in the repression, insisting they must abide by the rules and regulations of the countries in which they operate. Google does not list links to sites banned in China; certain words may not be used as titles for Microsoft blogs; and Yahoo!, which three years ago signed a Public Pledge on Self-discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry, provided information that helped Chinese authorities arrest Shi Tao (see above).
New restrictions have affected traditional media. A 2005 regulation now obliges Chinese reporters not affiliated with official media outlets to secure a license, obtainable only after attending classes, passing a written examination, and submitting an essay reflecting the ideological training they received. Certain topics are taboo. In 2005, mainland journalists could not file their own stories about the death of Zhao Ziyang, former premier of China, the anti-Japanese protests, the election of a new Pope, or the incidence of bird flu in China.
Chinese assistants and activists who work for or assist foreign journalists run severe risks. In October 2005, local thugs savagely beat Lu Banglie, who worked with residents of Taishi village, Guangdong province, to unseat a village chief they accused of corruption. Lu was helping a journalist from The Guardian, a British newspaper.
In July 2005, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television banned regional broadcasters from cooperating with overseas media organizations. In August, the Culture Ministry announced that new applications for licenses to import print and electronic publications would not be accepted. To ensure censorship worked, the police announced a regional system of hotlines for reporting illegal publications.
Labor Rights Workers in China may not form autonomous unions. Officials insist that the Party-run All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) sufficiently ensures their rights, in spite of unsafe and unhealthy working conditions––according to official figures, sixteen million enterprises are “toxic” and over two hundred million workers suffer from 115 occupational diseases––unpaid wages, pensions lost when state-owned enterprises go bankrupt or are privatized, and forced and uncompensated overtime.
During 2005, workers repeatedly took to the streets. Some went to prison. Li Xintao, formerly a worker at the Huamei Garment Company in Shandong province, was sentenced to a five-year term in May 2005 for “disturbing public order [and] government institutions.” He had tried to collect wages owed by a bankrupt state-owned enterprise. In October, police detained eight workers leading a protest against the closure of a steel plant in Chongqing.
Miners and a “floating population” of rural laborers have suffered disastrous accident rates. In spite of new policies, official figures report that 4,228 people lost their lives in 2,337 coal mining accidents from January through September 2005.
Religious Belief and Expression The Regulations on Religious Affairs that went into effect in March 2005 codified religious policy in effect since 1982. All congregations, mosques, temples, churches, and monasteries must be registered to be legal. However, registration brings vetting and ongoing monitoring of religious personnel, seminary applicants, and publications; scrutiny of financial records and membership rolls; and veto power over group activities. Failure to register renders a group illegal and subject to closure, fines, and criminal sanctions.
Particularly troublesome are limits on large-scale religious gatherings and on the number of religious sites in a given area; acceptance of “guidance, supervision and inspection” by “relevant departments of the local people’s government;” and a requirement that religious bodies “safeguard unification of the country, unity of all nationalities, and stability of society.” This last requirement is vague enough to give the state control of any and all religious teachings and is rigorously enforced in the Tibet Autonomous Region, in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and in other areas with large concentrations of non-Han populations.
Equally troubling is increased vetting of relationships between Chinese religious bodies and their foreign counterparts. Officials continue to express fears that international religious ties are a façade for Western infiltration.
The new policies have been reflected in round-ups of non-registered Christians attending training sessions. Most are released quickly, some after paying fines. Despite statements suggesting accommodation between China and the Vatican, at this writing some forty Catholic clergy were being detained, imprisoned, or otherwise restricted from freely moving about.
Petitioners––The Xinfang System Under China’s unique petitioning system, citizens dissatisfied with decisions by local officials or courts may write letters of complaint or appear in person at petition bureaus, and they may appeal to petition offices in regional capitals and even in Beijing. Repression of petitioners has increased as the number of petitions has grown.
Aggrieved parties have learned that public pressure forces officials to pay attention to issues such as corruption, forced evictions, and police abuse, and millions have taken to filing petitions. Local and regional officials whose careers and income could be jeopardized by popular expressions of discontent have, in turn, relied on ever harsher measures to disperse petitioners, frequently employing “retrievers,” who use force to break up protests and forcibly return home petitioners congregating in Beijing or in provincial capitals.
Although petitions are rarely effective, the growth in number and increased presence of petitioners in major urban areas has forced central authorities to confront systemic problems. New amendments to petitioning regulations, in effect since May 1, 2005, mandate punishment for those who retaliate against petitioners and for officials who fail to carry out their duties. The same regulations, however, restrict petitioner activism.
Xinjiang and the “War on Terror” Chinese authorities appear determined to eradicate an independent cultural identity, and the religious beliefs closely intertwined with that identity, for Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The campaign, which extends to personal behavior and appearance, includes vetting of literature, destruction of mosques, and discharge of Uighur cadres unwilling to forcibly implement religious directives. Authorities also have fostered extensive Chinese migration into the region leading to economic disparities favoring the newcomers.
Under current policies, children under eighteen may not receive religious instruction and college students fear reprisals, including expulsion, for overt religious expression. “Strike Hard” campaigns subject Uighurs who express “separatist” tendencies to quick, secret, and summary trials, sometimes accompanied by mass sentencing rallies. Imposition of the death penalty is common.
After September 11, 2001, China used the “war on terrorism” to justify its policies, making no distinction between the handful of separatists who condone violence and those who desire genuine autonomy or a separate state. In fact, the authorities treat cultural expressions of identity as equivalent to violent agitation. In February 2005, Uighur writer Nurmemet Yasin was sentenced to a ten-year prison term for publishing “The Wild Pigeon,” an alleged separatist tract. Korash Huseyin, editor of the journal that published the story, is serving a three-year term.
Tibet Chinese authorities view the Dalai Lama, in exile in India since 1959, as the linchpin of the effort to separate Tibet from China and view Tibetan Buddhist belief as supportive of his efforts. Thus, the government limits the number of monasteries and monks, vets all applicants for the monkhood, interferes with the selection of monastic leaders, prohibits performance of traditional rites, and conducts ongoing reeducation campaigns centered on opposition to the Dalai Lama. In July 2005, the chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region announced that China would choose the next Dalai Lama.
Suspected separatists are routinely imprisoned; at this writing such individuals included two monks from Sichuan who received eleven-year prison sentences, probably in early 2005, for hoisting the banned Tibetan flag. Chinese authorities have long refused to allow access to the boy the Dalai Lama identified in 1995 as the new Panchen Lama (the second most important personage in Tibetan Buddhism), instead keeping him under virtual house arrest most likely in Beijing. In his place, Chinese authorities recognized another boy as the Panchen Lama and in June 2005 in Sichuan they ordered monks to come out in force to greet him. Authorities held several suspected “troublemakers” in preventive detention in advance of the visit.
In January 2005, Nepal abruptly closed the Tibetan Refugee Welfare Office in Kathmandu, jeopardizing a long-standing agreement under which Tibetans hoping to reach India could wait in Nepal until the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cleared them. Although Tibetans in Nepal have met the government’s conditions for replacing the office, Nepali authorities have stonewalled. Pressure from China is assumed to have been behind the closing and the refusal to accept another Tibetan organization as a replacement.
Schools in Tibet limit use of the Tibetan language and neglect to teach students Tibetan history and culture. Officials do not tolerate privately-run Tibetan schools.
HIV/AIDS Although Chinese authorities have announced new steps to address the country’s burgeoning HIV/AIDS crisis, they continue to obstruct the efforts of activists and grassroots organizations to contribute to prevention and education among vulnerable groups and to organize care-giving for those infected. Regulations have thwarted activists’ attempts to register their organizations and to raise funds, while Internet censorship has restricted the kind of information available to individuals at high-risk. Activists who attempt to bring problems related to the crisis to media attention have been particularly vulnerable to harassment.
Forced Evictions With courts offering little protection, urban and rural residents have banded together to protest collusion between developers and local officials who forcibly evict them from their urban homes or, without offering adequate compensation, sell off the land they have been farming. Residents rarely win, in part because land is not individually owned and in part because local judges owe their jobs to local government and Party leaders. A 2003 constitutional amendment that protects “lawful private property” has not brought redress.
Protest organizers, such as Song Shitai in Shanghai, face intimidation and violence. The city forcibly relocated fifty-five thousand families in 2004. With building for the 2010 World Expo already underway, the 2005 tally is expected to be even higher. In March 2005, Chinese officials announced plans to move five hundred thousand families to the outskirts of Beijing in order to protect the environment. In September, they announced that twelve “shabby” villages near 2008 Olympic sites would be demolished.
Hong Kong When Hong Kong became a Special Autonomous Region within the People’s Republic of China in 1997 under the principle of “one country, two systems,” it was promised a “high degree of autonomy.” The Hong Kong government’s October 2005 proposal for constitutional reform, ostensibly an incremental step toward “universal suffrage,” failed to mention how and when Hong Kong’s citizens would achieve that goal.
There is no indication that Beijing, which reserves to itself the right to veto any proposed electoral change and to interpret the Basic Law, Hong’s Kong’s mini-constitution, will support any initiative to further “one-person, one-vote” democracy in Hong Kong. At the first meeting of its kind between Hong Kong’s pro-democracy legislators and Guangdong provincial officials, sharp disagreement erupted over the issue.
Human Rights Defenders China has never tolerated independent monitoring and reporting of human rights abuses. Lawyers and activists who use Chinese law to assist rights victims are particularly at risk. Since August 2005, officials in Shandong province have confined Chen Guangcheng, a blind local farmer, to his home and tolerated his repeated beatings by local thugs. Chen had been working with Beijing-based lawyers to prepare a suit against local officials who committed human rights abuses during enforcement of China’s family planning policy.
Later in August, China closed down the Empowerment and Rights Institute and, for a time, restricted the freedom of Hou Wenzhou, its founder. The organization had been advising farmers and petitioners about their rights.
Yang Maodong (more commonly known as Guo Feixiong), a lawyer who assisted Taishi villagers (see above), was formally arrested on October 4, 2005. He was first detained in September on suspicion of gathering crowds to disrupt social order.
In November 2005, using a thinly veiled administrative pretext, authorities ordered Gao Zhisheng to close his law firm for one year or risk restriction on his personal freedom. Gao’s firm had taken on sensitive cases involving labor issues, cyberdissidents, Falungong and religious practitioners, and the case of Yang Maodong.
HIV/AIDS activists, as mentioned above, have been routinely harassed, detained, and roughed up, but to date, officials have permitted some of their organizations to stay open so long as they operated within government-enforced strictures.
Key International Actors China has taken an increasingly active role in international affairs in recent years, in a number of cases blocking independent U.N. investigations into country situations, asserting that the issues under discussion are “the internal affairs” of that country.
At the U.N. Security Council, China was one of several countries initially unwilling to refer the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan to the International Criminal Court in 2005. In the end, rather than veto the measure, China abstained and the referral was made. China reportedly also has used its position on the council’s Sanctions Committee for Darfur to impede identification of individuals responsible for arms trade into and offensive military flights over Darfur.
China also has played an important role in blocking the Security Council from addressing systematic human rights abuses by Burma’s military government. China is Burma’s largest investor and supplier of economic and military aid.
In May 2005, two weeks after the Uzbek army killed hundreds of civilians in Andijan, Uzbekistan, the Chinese government greeted Uzbek’s president in Beijing with a twenty-one-gun salute and failed to endorse calls for an independent international investigation into the Andijan violence. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, composed of Russia, China, and four Central Asian states, characterized the Andijan incident as a terrorist plot.
The Chinese government refuses to cooperate with the U.N. special rapporteur on North Korea and refuses to allow the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees access to border areas where most North Koreans reside.
In 2005, the presidents of China and the United States met briefly in New York in August and in Beijing in mid-November. President Hu also met with Premier Paul Martin in Canada and with Prime Minister Tony Blair, representing the E.U., in Beijing and later in London. Although President Bush, in a speech in Kyoto, Japan on November 17, prodded China to extend political and religious freedoms and to embrace democracy, his Beijing agenda was long on economic and security concerns and short on human rights. Other Western governments’ preoccupations were similar. Exchanges with China over human rights have been largely relegated to ineffective bilateral dialogues.
The United States did not table a resolution on China’s human rights practices at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 2005, apparently in exchange for China’s willingness to cooperate with U.N. human rights mechanisms, among other steps. China extended an invitation to the U.N. special rapporteur on torture in 2005 but at this writing still had not extended one to the special rapporteur on religious freedom.
Following his visit to China in October 2005, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz singled out two non-economic factors, rule of law and participation of civil society, as important for economic development. Both are issues with important human rights aspects. The Bank expects to lend China between U.S.$1 billion to U.S. $1.5 billion a year for the next five years.
The New York Times reports that the PRC government is on a campaign to silence dissidents in preparation for the Beijing Olympics.
The more that I read about things like this, the more I feel that democratic nations--or failing that, individual athletes--should boycott the games. If they go to Beijing, it's a tacit acknowledgement that they don't really care about human rights.
Seven years ago, China struck a nervy bargain. It badly wanted this summer's Olympic Games to showcase the booming, fast-changing country. It landed the bid, in part, by promising that human rights would be honored.
That pledge is now badly shredded. China's leaders have a long way to go to repair the damage they've done to themselves and the trust the outside world extended.
China continues to lock up its own journalists and dissidents while interfering with foreign reporters. By one count there are 32 reporters and 55 human rights protesters in Chinese jails. Watchdog groups have repeatedly underlined these harsh facts, noting that the government crackdown is widening as the games draw closer.
China's care and feeding of the Sudanese government responsible for Darfur genocide demonstrates the same attitude on an international scale. China buys two-thirds of the African country's oil exports and doesn't want to jeopardize this supply, however tainted.
This stance on Darfur led Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to bow out as an Olympics adviser after he tried repeatedly to prod Beijing leaders to use their influence to stop the killings. He's the latest in a string of entertainers, legislators and scientific leaders in this country who have also pressured China to change.
In response, Beijing is anything but conciliatory. It routinely dismisses any criticism as foreign interference and disputes the linkage between Darfur and its sponsorship of the Olympics. As its society modernizes - and Internet communications widen - the country's leaders are clearly worried about losing their grip.
Chinese leaders may be banking on the popularity of the Olympics to outshine its problems. The country has spent an estimated $38 billion to prepare for the events and expects 500,000 visitors. Commercial sponsors - many of them U.S. corporations - and officials in charge of national teams are trying to sidestep the lack of human rights and democracy in the host country.
But ignoring the problem isn't possible. China's disregard for personal freedom will undercut the sunny sports coverage that accompanies the games in August.
Unless it changes direction, Beijing won't get the fireworks-filled coming-out party it wants. Instead it will turn in a last-place finish on human rights it promised to honor.
Here's what happens, apparently, when someone disagrees with the PRC government:
China rights lawyer disappears, feared detained (Adds comments from activist, paragraphs 16-18) By Chris Buckley BEIJING, March 7 (Reuters) - A Chinese human rights lawyer who has defended dissidents and urged stronger citizens' rights ahead of the 2008 Olympics is missing, family and colleagues said on Friday, fearful he may have been secretly detained by police. The lawyer, Teng Biao, has belonged to a lively network of young Chinese activists who have used test cases, online petitions and media publicity to campaign for stronger rights under the ruling Communist Party. Beijing has faced a surge of calls to improve human rights from international groups and activists ahead of the Games, a period when many local dissidents expect to be closely watched, isolated or detained. A teacher at a Beijing law school, Teng, 34, recently urged authorities to free Hu Jia, an outspoken Beijing dissident who faces subversion charges after spending much of last year under house arrest. He also warned last month that Beijing's Olympic Games, which open on Aug. 8, had led to some retreat in China's human rights. But now Teng's wife and friends fear he may have been subjected to one of the secretive state security detentions he has often decried. Teng phoned his wife, Wang Ling, on Thursday night to say he was heading home, but never arrived at the door of their sixth-floor apartment in the capital's north, Wang said. "About 20 minutes after he called, I heard someone yell out downstairs," she said by telephone. "I went downstairs and our car was there but he wasn't. Two women said they'd seen a man taken from the car and pushed into a black car without licence plates. That was the last he was seen." REPORTED MISSING Wang said she reported her husband's disappearance to police but had heard nothing of his whereabouts. "He's never done anything that would attract personal vendettas, but he writes essays and defends rights. So it may be related to the government, but I can't be sure," she said. Officers at the district Public Security Bureau near Teng's home responded to questions about him by hanging up or passing the query on to other officers who also deflected questions. Teng's mobile appeared to be switched off when Reuters made repeated attempts to call him. "To judge from what's happened in recent years, the Olympic Games have not brought China the free, open space that people expected," Teng said in an interview last month that appeared on the overseas Chinese Web site Boxun (http://www.peacehall.com). "There has been no obvious improvement in the human rights situation, and in some areas the situation has deteriorated." A rights activist who spoke to Teng recently said he appeared "deeply downcast and under pressure", partly because state security officers had confiscated his passport and a deadline loomed for deciding whether to challenge their act in court. "He said they'd also warned him not to speak out about Hu Jia and to stop taking interviews and publishing essays," said the source, who requested anonymity. "He told us, 'There's no guarantee that any of this is going to get easier after the Olympics'." Another Beijing-based rights advocate, Xu Zhiyong, backed Wang's account of Teng's disappearance and said he was puzzled why Teng would be detained. "He's not at all an extremist," said Xu, a law professor. "It may be because of Hu Jia but we're all just guessing and waiting for more information." (Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)
According to Google News, the U.S. State Department has decided to remove the PRC from its list of the world's 10 worst abusers of human rights. No reason was given for the change in State's view of China, which had made the 2005 and 2006 10-worst lists, but now is moved to the list of "authoritarian countries undergoing change," as the article puts it.
I guess this is what Condoleezza Rice defines as change:
During the year there were reports that officials used electric shocks, beatings, shackles, and other forms of abuse. In February and March legal advisor and rights activist Guo Feixiong (also known as Yang Maodong) reportedly suffered repeated torture, including electric shocks and being tied to a "tiger bench" for four hours. When on a "tiger bench" the victim reportedly sits on a bench with legs tied stretched out straight on the bench and hands tied behind a vertical back support. Bricks or other hard objects are then pushed under the victim's legs or feet, causing the legs to bend upwards, sometimes until they break. The abuse reportedly drove Guo to attempt suicide. In June Guo Feixiong's wife reportedly sent an open letter to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak detailing her husband's abuse in prison, which included beatings with electric police batons when Guo refused to make a confession. On September 29, rights defender Li Heping reportedly was detained for six hours by plainclothes assailants who beat and tortured him with cattle prods before releasing him. In October a recently released cellmate of land activist Yang Chunlin reported that Yang was tortured in prison, including having his legs and arms stretched and chained to four corners of an iron bed for days.
CNN reports the PRC government's reaction to the State Department's human rights report on China:
China's foreign minister Wednesday rejected criticism of its human rights record, accusing the United States of "clinging to a Cold War mentality" and "practicing double standards."
Yang Jiechi was responding to questions about a State Department report released a day earlier that characterized China's human rights record as one of the most repressive in the world.
While I'm no apologist for the PRC's authoritarian rule, I have to admit that he has a point. After all, considering what the U.S. has been doing at Guantanamo for the past six years, we're hardly credible as a critic of another nation's human rights violations.
BEIJING, March 12 -- Human rights activists on Wednesday decried the U.S. State Department's decision to drop China from its list of the world's worst human rights violators, saying that China's crackdown on dissent is getting worse as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in August.
"We and others have documented a sharp uptick in human rights violations directly related to preparations for the Olympics," said Phelim Kine, Asia researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch. The decision comes at the worst possible time for activists seeking to pressure Beijing to relax restrictions on free speech, release political prisoners and improve human rights protections, Kine added.
Additionally, "U.S. authorities are depriving themselves of yet another effective way to pressure China, without having achieved any goodwill gesture from Beijing," Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in a statement. "The human rights dialogue between the two countries is set to resume, but shouldn't the U.S. have waited for a massive release of prisoners and an end to censorship before dropping China from the list?"
Frankly, I don't understand it either. Except that this is more proof that President Bush's supposed commitment to promoting democracy, human rights and freedom is just talk. On the other hand, as I pointed out initially, the U.S. doesn't have much credibility on human rights, so long as it is operating Guantanamo.
The PRC government obviously didn't see the State Department's latest human rights report on China as a positive. They responded by issuing their own report on human rights violations in the U.S. Here's an excerpt, from Xinhuanet:
II. On Human Rights Violations by Law Enforcement and Judicial Departments
The abuse of their power by law enforcement and judicial departments in the United States has seriously violated the freedom and rights of its citizens.
Cases in which U.S. law enforcement authorities allegedly violated victims' civil rights increased by 25 percent from fiscal year 2001 to 2007 over the previous seven years, according to statistics from U.S. Department of Justice (Police Brutality Casesup 25%; Union Worried Over Dip in Hiring Standards, USA Today, December 18, 2007). The national average among large police departments for excessive-force complaints was 9.5 per 100 full-time officers (The New York Times, November 14, 2007). But the majority of law enforcement officers accused of brutality were not prosecuted in the end. From May 2001 to June 2006, 2,451 police officers in Chicago received four to 10 complaints each, 662 of them received more than 10 complaints each, but only 22 were punished. Furthermore, there were officers who had amassed more than 50 abuse complaints but were never disciplined in any fashion (The Chicago Police Department's Broken System, University of Chicago, www.law.chicago.edu). On August 17, 2006, a 52-year-old Chicago woman named Dolores Robare was nearly struck by a speeding police car when she was crossing the road. The officer stopped and asked her to produce her identification. She was brutally beaten by the police when she asked them why it was taking so long (The Chicago Tribune, May 1, 2007). On December 15,2006, four businessmen were beaten by six off-duty officers at a bar for no apparent reasons (The Chicago Tribune, June 9, 2007). On August 3, 42-year-old African American Geffrey Johnson was killed at his home by the police using a taser gun. On August 6, 18-year-old black youth Aaron Harrison was shot in the back and killed by police pursuing him (The Chicago Tribune, August 9, 2007). On May 1 when Latino immigrants were campaigning for the rights of illegal immigrants at MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles, police officers abused their power by clubbing demonstrators and journalists and shooting them with rubber bullets (The Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2007). On November 12, five police officers fired 20 bullets at 18-year-old youth Khiel Coppin, eight hitting him, in front of his mother's house, after mistaking a comb he was brandishing as a gun (The China Press, New York, November 19, 2007). According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in October 2007, 47 states and the District of Columbia reported 2,002 arrest-related deaths between 2003 and 2005. Among these, 1,095, or 55 percent, were killed by gunfire of state or local police (Death in Custody Statistical Tables, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs). The United States of America is the world's largest prison and has the highest inmates/population ratio in the world. A December 5, 2007 report by EFE news agency quoted statistics of U.S. Department of Justice as saying that the number of inmates in U.S. prisons has increased by 500 percent over the last 30 years. By the end of 2006, there were 2.26 million inmates in U.S. prisons, up 2.8 percent from a year ago. The number is the highest over the last six years. The U.S. population only accounted for 5 percent of the world total, but its inmates made up 25 percent of the world total. There were 751 inmates in every 100,000 U.S. citizens, far higher than the rates in other Western countries (EFE news agency, December 5, 2007). Among the inmates, 96 percent were serving sentences of more than one year, which equaled about one in every 200 U.S. citizens serving a sentence of more than a year (Prisoners In 2006, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs). Since the September 11 attacks, reincarceration rate has been rising in the United States. According to statistics, about two thirds of the inmates would commit a second crime within three years after releasing. Two out of three inmates would be caught again after their release and 40 percent would be put behind bars again.
Abusing the inmates is commonplace in U.S. prisons. According to a report released by U.S. Department of Justice in December 2007, an estimated 60,500 inmates, or 4.5 percent of State and Federal inmates, experienced one or more incidents of sexual victimization, 2.9 percent of the inmates reported an incident involving prison staff, 0.5 percent said they had been sexually victimized by both other inmates and staff, 0.8 percent of the inmates were injured as a result of sexual victimization (Sexual Victimization in State and Federal Prisons Reported by Inmates, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs). The U.S. government acknowledged in a January 16, 2007 report that suspected illegal immigrants were mistreated in five prisons, breaching the principle of humane custody (The Washington Post, January 17, 2007). The Washington Post reported on December 17, 2007 that juvenile inmates in a West Texas youth prison were sexually assaulted or beaten and denied medical care. Those who reported the crime got revenged upon and the situation remained unimproved months after the scandal was brought to light. (Dad Dismissed Prison Reform, The Washington Times, December 17, 2007).In January 2008, seven prisoners in Georgia State filed a class-action lawsuit accusing guards and other corrections officers of abusing and torturing them between October 2005 and August 2007, including beating them with batons and special black leather "beating gloves" and ramming inmates' heads against the wall. Media reports said some 40 inmates in other Georgia prisons complained of similar cases, in which guards strapped nude inmates to iron beds or iron chairs, denying them of food, water or access to bathroom for as long as 48 hours, and causing the death of two inmates (International Herald Tribune, January 8, 2008). Guards in American prisons regularly use taser guns. According to a 2007 report from Amnesty International, 230 Americans have died from taser guns since 2001. In July 2006, a prison in Garfield County, Colorado was accused of regularly using taser guns or pepper sprayers on inmates, and then tying them to chairs in awkward positions for hours. In August, prison guards in Arapahoe County of Colorado strapped inmate Raul Gallegos-Reyes to a restraint chair for yelling and knocking on his cell door. He died after being repeatedly stunned with a taser gun.
U.S. prisoners often die from HIV/AIDS infection or inadequate medical service. A report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2007 said there were 22,480 state and federal inmates who were HIV infected or had confirmed AIDS at yearend 2005, 5,620 inmates had confirmed AIDS. During 2005 an estimated 176 state and 27 federal inmates died from AIDS-related causes (HIV in prisons 2005, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs). According to a report by the Los Angeles Times on September 20, 2007, 426 death cases took place in California prisons in 2006 due to belated treatment. Among them, 18 deaths were found to be "preventable" and an additional 48 were found to be "possibly preventable". On April 14, 2007, 41-year-old diabetic prisoner Rodolfo Ramos died after being left alone and covered in his own feces for a week. Prison officials failed to get medical treatment for him despite knowing of his condition (The Associated Press, April 27, 2007).
The justice of U.S. judicial system was increasingly put in question. Survey finds that since the first DNA exoneration in 1989, there have been 209 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. The average length of time served by exonerees is 12 years. The average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions was 26, and 15 of the 209 people exonerated through DNA served time on death row (Facts on Post-Conviction DNA Exonerations, Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.com). The Associated Press reported on January 3, 2008 that Charles Chatman of Texas was proved innocent by DNA evidence after spending 26 years in prison. In 1981, he was sentenced to 99 years in prison after convicted of committing serious sexual assaults. He was the 15th inmate exonerated by DNA evidence in Dalas since 2001 (Texas Man Exonerated by DNA After 26 Years, the Associated Press, January 3, 2008).
I'm doing posts about Tibet in this thread also, because the current situation there is looming so large over China's international image and reputation right now. Also, thought the PRC government and China's Han ethnic majority might would disagree, most everybody else in the world seems to view this as a human rights issue.
Here's Australian news coverage of a protest at the United Nations in NYC by Tibetan monks.
