China blasted on rights as Games near

by Dan Martin | AFP | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
August 7, 2007

China's communist leaders faced a barrage of criticism at home and abroad on Tuesday over human rights abuses, casting a shadow over Beijing's efforts to celebrate the one-year Olympics countdown.

Leading the calls for Beijing to start honouring Olympic ideals was a group of China's top dissidents, who issued a rare open letter calling for an end to the "systematic denial of human rights" in the country.

The letter, signed by 37 dissidents, writers, lawyers and academics, urged the government to free all prisoners of conscience, allow the return of dissidents abroad and release its stranglehold over the media.

Not doing so makes a mockery of Beijing's own 2008 Games slogan "One World, One Dream", said the petition.

"'One world' can still be a world where people suffer discrimination, political and religious persecution, and deprivation of liberty," said the letter, posted on the website of China Rights Defenders, a loose coalition of rights activists.

Organised campaigns by China's small and harried dissident community are rare.

The signatories included Bao Tong, once a close aide to deposed former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang and now the country's top dissident.

"Human rights is the most important matter facing China," Bao, who lives under tight surveillance in Beijing, told AFP by phone.

"The Olympic motto of 'One World, One Dream' should apply to the rights of the Chinese people as well."

The petition's release was timed to pressure China as it marks Wednesday's one-year countdown to the Beijing Games, which start on August 8, 2008, with much fanfare.

China is planning a huge party on Wednesday at Tiananmen Square, the same place where the military crushed democracy protests in 1989, killing hundreds if not thousands of people.

Amnesty International said China would tarnish its own image and the Olympic movement unless it took urgent action on human rights.

It said dissidents and rights defenders remained in detention or under tight monitoring, and that authorities continued to use detention without trial in efforts to "clean up" Beijing for the Olympics.

Also Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Human Rights Watch released separate reports saying foreign and Chinese reporters were still being harassed despite pledges of greater media freedom ahead of the Games.

The reports said police and plainclothes "thugs" working for the government were often used to intimidate or even attack reporters covering issues the government hopes to suppress, such as political dissidents, China's control of Tibet, the spread of HIV, and social unrest.

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