Amnesty Switzerland makes demands on China

By Neue Zuercher Zeitung (Switzerland) - NZZonline
May 05, 2007

The Swiss section of Amnesty International has launched a campaign for better respect for human rights in China, ahead of next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.

At a congress on Saturday in Locarno in southern Switzerland, Amnesty started collecting signatures for a petition to be handed in to the Chinese embassy in Bern six months before the event.

The campaign, which runs under the slogan: "Human Rights on the Podium", has four demands: the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of re-education camps, the lifting of internet censorship and a halt to reprisals against defenders of human rights.

"The Chinese committee that bid for the event promised that the Olympic Games in Beijing would contribute to the development of human rights," campaign coordinator Christine Heller told a news conference in Locarno.

She added that nothing concrete had yet come from the promises made.

According to Amnesty, hundreds of thousands of people are detained in so-called re-education centres.

"Cleaning up"

It says the Chinese authorities have been "cleaning up" Beijing for months. The homeless, beggars and street hawkers are being detained and can face up to three years in re-education camps without being charged.

"Four years ago I still believed that the internet would bring democracy to China," commented 52-year-old philosophy professor and Chinese government critic Cai Chongguo, who fled the country in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre and now lives in Paris.

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