Chinese Government Tortures Activists
A Human Rights Group Candidly accuses the Chinese Government of torturing certain political and activist prisoners in a lecture to the United Nations.
Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of lawyers, academics and activists from round the country, has grown in the shadows of state suppression in the last two years.
Its survival is a token of the courage of its members, who have been harassed, imprisoned and beaten as they take up difficult cases and attempt to promote legal reform.
“Twenty years after China ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1988, all are routinely practiced by government personnel,” said the submission. It was just one of a number being put before a two-day hearing by the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva.
It remains unclear whether the group’s survival so far is in spite of government attempts to target individual members, or because Beijing is bowing to international pressure to allow more space for home-grown activism.
Members are also careful to work within the letter of the Chinese law and constitution when promoting their causes.
A number of activists were arrested and jailed in advance of the Olympic Games, including some with links to the group such as Hu Jia, who was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought last month.
But some concessions made during the Games, such as the lifting of internet blocks on the websites of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in Beijing, have remained in place.
The submission by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders contradicts in numerous places the Chinese government’s own report to the UN committee. This denies allegations that there is widespread use of torture and illegal detention, saying occasional cases of ill-treatment are the work of individual “bad apples” who are rooted out and punished.
“The extremely few cases of torture found in detention facilities are personal law-breaking acts towards detainees by a few keepers who failed to perform their duties properly,” the government’s version said.
The human rights group said: “Except for some progress in the promulgation of legislation and administrative documents, China has made no clear and discernible improvement in prohibiting the use of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
It went on to give detailed case studies of abuses including beatings, forced labour, detention in psychiatric hospitals and forced abortions.
Among the causes taken up by lawyers and others who are associated with the group are those of petitioners complaining to the government about forced eviction from their homes and land to make way for development.
Many of these have been detained in so-called “black jails” - hostels used as illegal detention centres in Beijing for those who stage anti-government protests, while officials and police from their homes provinces arrive to return them home.
The government also denied the existence of such jails in their submission to the UN committee, despite widespread documentation of their use.
The UN committee is also considering evidence of the treatment of those detained during and after the protests and violence that broke out across Tibet in March this year.
Tibet support groups have supplied evidence of shootings of protesters and deaths in custody of Tibetans. The Chinese government response makes no reference to such claims, and refers only to deaths during the violence of March 14, when 18 people were killed by Tibetan rioters in the capital, Lhasa.
The incidents were not “parades and demonstrations”, it said.
Waterboarding, according to the CIA - some of whose most senior officials are currently giving evidence before a congressional inquiry into the organisation’s decision to deliberately destroy video recordings of two al-Qaida captives being subjected to the practice - is merely an “enhanced coercive interrogation technique”. This magnificent phrase prompts the following brief reminder of the burgeoning lexicon of euphemisms now employed by the Bush administration to describe what the president himself is pleased to refer to as “the tools necessary to protect the American people”.
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