Human Rights: March 2006 Archives
Reporters Without Borders
March 21, 2006
Reporters Without Borders wrote to President Hu Jintao today asking him to intervene on behalf of documentary filmmaker Hao Wu, who was arrested in Beijing on 22 February after attending a meeting of members of a protestant church not recognised by the government as part of the preparation of his next documentary.
Hao, who lived for more than 10 years in the United States, is a contributor to Global Voices, a bloggers association that belongs to the Reporters Without Borders network of partner organisations.
"Hao’s only crime has been to do his job as journalist in an independent manner," Reporters Without Borders said in its letter to President Hu. The organisation also called on US diplomats to raise Hao’s case with the Chinese authorities, above all as part of the preparations for Hu’s visit to the United States next month.
Hao was detained by the Beijing division of the State Security Bureau, which has officially confirmed his arrest. Two days after his arrest, police raided his home, seizing videotapes and editing equipment. He has not been charges and the authorities have not explained why they are holding him.
The Epoch Times
March 20, 2006
Subjects of live cornea removal are mainly the elderly or children
The Epoch Times has conducted another interview with the witness who came forward several days ago to reveal details regarding the Sujiatun concentration camp in Northeast China. In this interview the witness revealed that her ex-husband was one of the main surgeons in the concentration camp. He is a brain surgeon, and was mainly in charge of cornea removal. Because of the horrifying character of live organ removal and the burning of corpses, the witness and her family have had destructive life experiences. Every time she recalls events in Sujiatun, she endures indescribable pain.
The witness said that her ex-husband had a cell phone specifically for this type of business. No matter when and where, as soon as the cell phone rang, he would go to perform the operation. During the 2 years of working at Sujiatun, he did several cornea removal operations per day.
Her ex-husband told her that those detained in the Sujiatun concentration camp were all Falun Gong practitioners. For others, even prisoners sentenced to death, organ removals could not be done without proper paperwork and procedures. Only for Falun Gong practitioners, due to the central Communist Party policy that the deaths of practitioners are "counted as suicide," the hospital can detain and remove organs from them live without any procedures. Every surgeon knew they were Falun Gong practitioners. They were told that doing such things to Falun Gong practitioners were not crimes. Instead, they were "cleaning" for the Chinese Communist Party. Those on the operation table were either mentally destroyed or had lost consciousness. Major targets of cornea removal were the elderly and children.
By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
Beijing, March 16, 2006
Dutch psychiatrists have determined that a prominent Chinese dissident who spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric institution in Beijing did not have mental problems that would justify his incarceration, two human rights groups said Thursday.
The psychiatrists spent two days testing the dissident, Wang Wanxing, in Germany five months after China released him and sent him abroad. They said in a statement that their examination "did not reveal any form of mental disorder."
The report could add fuel to charges that the Chinese police use a network of psychiatric prisons to silence political dissidents, often without trial or right of appeal.
Mr. Wang, now 56, was confined to the psychiatric center after he was detained in 1992 for unfurling a banner that criticized the Communist Party.
The authorities determined that he had "delusions of grandeur, litigation mania and conspicuously enhanced pathological will," which Western human rights groups say are diagnoses that officials have used to lock up troublesome dissidents who have not broken any laws.
After his release in 2005, Mr. Wang described widespread abuses in the mental asylum, known as the Beijing Ankang. He said he had lived in cells with psychotically disturbed inmates convicted of murder and was forced to swallow drugs to blunt his will. He also said the staff members had used electrified acupuncture needles to punish patients while other inmates were made to watch.
BBC News
March 17, 2006
A Chinese teacher has been jailed for 10 years for an internet essay claiming people had a right to end tyranny by violent means, a rights group said.
Ren Zhiyuan's trial, for his essay the Road to Democracy, highlighted China's mounting crackdown on dissent.
It came as subversion charges against a Chinese researcher for the New York Times, Zhao Yan, were dropped.
Analysts said the case threatened to tarnish an upcoming visit to the US by China's President Hu Jintao.
Ren Zhiyuan, 27, pleaded not guilty to charges of "subversion of state power".
His lawyer, Zhang Chengmao, said his client would appeal the sentence.
"I do know that whatever Ren Zhiyuan wrote was totally within the scope of free expression," Zhang told Reuters news agency. "He was a teacher who had his own ideas, but he never acted on those ideas."
Ren had posted an essay called "The Road to Democracy" which argued that people had the right to violently overthrow tyranny, according to the New York-based Human Rights in China.
His sentencing appeared to contradict comments by government official Liu Zhengrong last month, who said that no one had been arrested just for writing online content.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS : The New York Times
March 14, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- China is refusing to take back an estimated 39,000 citizens that have been denied immigration to the United States, clogging detention centers on the taxpayer's bill, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Chertoff said that China last year readmitted 800 Chinese nationals. But that made only a small dent in what he described as a backlog of thousands of Chinese who are being held by the U.S.
''The math is pretty easy -- at that rate, we wind up with increasing numbers of migrants who, if we're going to detain them, we're going to have to house at enormous expense,'' Chertoff said.
He added: ''We can't be in the position any longer where we are paying the burden and bearing the burden for countries that won't cooperate with us and take their own citizens back.''
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately return a call for comment.
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