Human Rights: November 2008 Archives
By Steven Erlanger | INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
November 26, 2008
PARIS: China has postponed an annual summit with the European Union originally scheduled for next Monday, the Europeans said in a statement on Wednesday. The Chinese were evidently angered by a new visit to several European countries by the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
"The European Union, which set ambitious aims for the 11th European Union-China summit, takes note and regrets this decision by China," the statement said. According to the Europeans, the Chinese "said their decision was due to the fact that the Dalai Lama will at the same time undertake a new visit in several countries of the union and will meet on this occasion heads of state and government."
One of those leaders is President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who intends to meet the Dalai Lama in Poland in December at a ceremony honoring Lech Walesa, the anti-Communist leader of Solidarity and later Polish president. France holds the presidency of the European Union until the end of the year, so the Chinese postponement is thought to be aimed at France more than at the other nations of the union.
Two weeks ago, China warned that the planned meeting could hurt relations between France and China, but Sarkozy had already side-stepped a meeting with the Dalai Lama earlier this year in France to avoid offending the Chinese, though he sent his wife, Carla, and his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, to represent France.
Relations were strained before the Beijing Olympics when Sarkozy, pressed by public opinion after the latest Chinese crackdown in Tibet, said that his presence as European Union president at the games would depend on progress in talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama's envoys on the future of Tibet. The progress was considered scant and temporary, but it was sufficient for Sarkozy to attend.
By Andrew Jacobs | THE NEW YORK TIMES
November 25, 2008
The Chinese government reacted angrily on Monday to what it called a slanderous United Nations report that alleges systemic torture of political and criminal detainees. The government said the authors were biased, untruthful and driven by a political agenda.
The report, issued Friday by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, documented what the authors described as widespread abuse in the Chinese legal system, one that often gains convictions through forced confessions.
The report recounts China's use of "secret prisons" and the widespread harassment of lawyers who take on rights cases, and it criticizes the government's extralegal system of punishment, known as re-education through labor, which hands down prison terms to dissidents without judicial review.
"The state party should conduct prompt, impartial and effective investigations into all allegations of torture and ill treatment and should ensure that those responsible are prosecuted," said the report, which was written by a 10-member committee of independent experts.
Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, called the document "untrue and slanderous," and said that China cherished human rights and opposed torture. "To our regret, some biased committee members, in drafting the observations, chose to ignore the substantial materials provided by the Chinese Government," he said in a statement posted Monday on the ministry's Web site, adding that they "even fabricated some unverified information." The ministry did not describe the material it had provided to the United Nations committee.
The report's publication is another embarrassment for the Communist Party, which has been striving to demonstrate its commitment to human rights. Last month, the government was infuriated by the European Union's decision to honor Hu Jia, one of the country's best-known dissidents, who is serving a three-and-a-half year prison term for subversion; last week, China was angered by a United States Congressional report that criticized what it called China's failure to fulfill a pledge to improve human rights leading up to the Olympic Games and during them.
"Illegal detentions and harassment of dissidents and petitioners followed the Chinese government and Communist Party's instructions to officials to ensure a 'harmonious' and dissent-free Olympics," the report said. "Individuals detained for circulating a 'We Want Human Rights, Not Olympics' petition are now serving sentences in prison and 're-education through labor' centers."
Although China's Constitution includes provisions to protect human rights and China has ratified numerous international conventions banning torture, public security officials frequently use coercion to gain signed confessions. "I have yet to see a political case in which the person was not tortured or mistreated," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher based in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. Even though torture is technically illegal under Chinese law, he added, there is no explicit prohibition against evidence obtained through coercion.
Human rights advocates say that the government's crackdown on dissenters has not let up since the Games, when petitioners seeking permission to demonstrate in parks officially designated for protests were whisked away by the police.
The most recent cases include that of Guo Quan, an associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, who was detained on Nov. 13 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power" after he established an independent political party. Earlier, Liu Xueli, a farmer from Henan Province whose land had been confiscated by local officials, sought a protest permit during the Olympics and was sentenced to re-education through labor.
On Friday, a court in Chengdu handed down a three-year sentence to Chen Daojun, a journalist and environmental advocate who was convicted of "inciting to subvert state power." Mr. Chen was detained in May after he published articles on the Tibetan quest for greater autonomy and the spate of anti-Western demonstrations that erupted across China after the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by protesters in Paris, London and San Francisco.
Although prosecutors accused Mr. Chen, 40, of slandering the Communist Party, his lawyer, Zhu Jiuhu, suggested that the authorities might have been especially irked by Mr. Chen's participation in a demonstration this year opposing the construction of a petrochemical plant near Chengdu. Mr. Zhu said he was denied access to his client; the trial, he added, lasted less than an hour. "We tried our hardest," he said.
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Chen's wife, Zeng Qirong, said she had not seen her husband since he was taken into custody. She said he had often written literary criticism or articles about rural life.
The detention, she said, would be particularly onerous for the couple's 10-year-old son and Mr. Chen's sickly parents. "The process was not fair," she said of the trial. "They were only articles. It was his own opinion. He was only describing the way society is."
By CBS NEWS - 60 MINUTES - Broadcast on November 09, 2008
60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don't want you to see. It's a town in China where you can't breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.
It's worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.
That wasteland is piled with the burning remains of some of the most expensive, sophisticated stuff that consumers crave. And 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley discovered that the gangs who run this place wanted to keep it a secret.
What are they hiding? The answer lies in the first law of the digital age: newer is better. In with the next thing, and out with the old TV, phone or computer. All of this becomes obsolete, electronic garbage called "e-waste."
Computers may seem like sleek, high-tech marvels. But what's inside them?
"Lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, polyvinyl chlorides. All of these materials have known toxicological effects that range from brain damage to kidney disease to mutations, cancers," Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and authority on waste management at the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained.
"The problem with e-waste is that it is the fastest-growing component of the municipal waste stream worldwide," he said.
Asked what he meant by "fastest-growing," Hershkowitz said. "Well, we throw out about 130,000 computers every day in the United States."
And he said over 100 million cell phones are thrown out annually.
At a recycling event in Denver, 60 Minutes found cars bumper-to-bumper for blocks, in a line that lasted for hours. They were there to drop off their computers, PDAs, TVs and other electronic waste.
Asked what he thought happens once his e-waste goes into recycling, one man told Pelley, "Well my assumption is they break it apart and take all the heavy metals and out and then try to recycle some of the stuff that's bad."
Most folks in line were hoping to do the right thing, expecting that their waste would be recycled in state-of-the-art facilities that exist here in America. But really, there's no way for them to know where all of this is going. The recycling industry is exploding and, as it turns out, some so-called recyclers are shipping the waste overseas, where it's broken down for the precious metals inside.
Executive Recycling, of Englewood, Colo., which ran the Denver event, promised the public on its Web site: "Your e-waste is recycled properly, right here in the U.S. - not simply dumped on somebody else."
That policy helped Brandon Richter, the CEO of Executive Recycling, win a contract with the city of Denver and expand operations into three western states.
Asked what the problem is with shipping this waste overseas, Richter told Pelley, "Well, you know, they've got low-income labor over there. So obviously they don't have all of the right materials, the safety equipment to handle some of this material."
Executive does recycling in-house, but 60 Minutes was curious about shipping containers that were leaving its Colorado yard. 60 Minutes found one container filled with monitors. They're especially hazardous because each picture tube, called a cathode ray tube or CRT, contains several pounds of lead. It's against U.S. law to ship them overseas without special permission. 60 Minutes took down the container's number and followed it to Tacoma, Wash., where it was loaded on a ship.
When the container left Tacoma, 60 Minutes followed it for 7,459 miles to Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong.
It turns out the container that started in Denver was just one of thousands of containers on an underground, often illegal smuggling route, taking America's electronic trash to the Far East.
Our guide to that route was Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a watchdog group named for the treaty that is supposed to stop rich countries from dumping toxic waste on poor ones. Puckett runs a program to certify ethical recyclers. And he showed 60 Minutes what's piling up in Hong Kong.
"It's literally acres of computer monitors," Pelley commented. "Is it legal to import all of these computer monitors into Hong Kong?"
"No way. It is absolutely illegal, both from the standpoint of Hong Kong law but also U.S. law and Chinese law. But it's happening," Puckett said.
So he personally drove us to a shop.
"Let me explain what's happening here," Pelley remarked while in Guiyu. "We were brought into the mayor's office. The mayor told us that we're essentially not welcome here, but he would show us one place where computers are being dismantled and this is that place. A pretty tidy shop. The mayor told us that we would be welcome to see the rest of the town, but that the town wouldn't be prepared for our visit for another year.
By RADIO FREE ASIA (credits at end of article)
November 04, 2008
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in China's formerly booming coastal cities are heading home amid factory closures and labor disputes sparked by the global downturn.
SHENZHEN, China: Worker is detained during a sit-in protest outside a government building, 30 October 2008.
Millions of workers who flooded to China's booming coastal cities to find work during the past decade are now beginning to return home amid a wave of factory closures and unemployment sparked by the global financial crisis.
In a phenomenon more usual around the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, trains and long-distance bus networks are packed full of people heading west and inland, making tickets hard to come by as people head home to cut losses and be reunited with their families.
"A lot of people are workers returning to their family homes," one passenger on a packed train in southwestern China's Yunnan province said.
Factory closures and rising unemployment in the Pearl River Delta and eastern coastal regions are also sparking labor unrest, as workers stage demonstrations to demand their back pay and severance benefits from factories now in administration.
Police in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen detained eight former workers for the now bankrupt Hong Kong-invested watchmaker Yijinli following days of sit-ins and clashes with hundreds of workers who had not yet been paid by the administrators.
"There were about six or seven security personnel detaining one person," a former Yijinli worker surnamed Ou said of clashes that began Friday in the city's Bao'an district.
Workers demand back pay
"They pressed him to the floor and beat him really badly. Then they told us to get in the police vehicles, that there would be a free bus back to the factory. They still hadn't given us a response [to our demands]."
He said the workers had refused to move until their demands were met.
"Soon after that, more than 100 riot police came rushing in and started to drag us away. If anyone refused to get on the bus they would beat them. They said that the workers who had led the protest were disturbing public order. They detained seven people," Ou said.
A relative of one of the detainees, surnamed Yang, said the detention of his relative brought the total to eight.
"On Friday evening they detained one other worker. His name was Yang Daicheng. He had been speaking out quite fiercely around the factory," Yang said.
"That day they detained seven people. Now the total is eight. Four other people were taken in for questioning and held overnight."
Bao'an factories closed
He said most of the workers had left Shenzhen after collecting their back pay and severance benefits.
Government labor officials in the crisis-hit coastal cities have been scrambling to deal with a wave of such disputes, according to official media.
Four workers were injured in a scuffle with security guards when they took to the Shenzhen streets demanding back wages from Taiwan-invested appliance maker Shunyi Appliance Factory, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The factory bosses couldn't be contacted, said Xinhua, which blamed the wave of closures on the rising value of the yuan, spiraling costs, and eroding orders.
The Shenzhen Labor and Social Security Bureau on Tuesday publicized the names of 30 companies that owe a combined 12 million yuan (U.S. $1.75 million) in back pay to workers. The Bureau demanded that executives report to the local labor authorities within 30 days, Xinhua said.
Fear of social unrest
In some places, the government has paid workers out of its own coffers to avoid further social unrest. Xinhua said the township government of Zhangmutou had pledged a payout to workers at the bankrupt Smart Union factory in Dongguan city worth 24 million yuan (U.S.$3.5 million).
Chinese experts say governments at different levels plan to earmark money for contingency reserve funds to help unpaid employees, most of them migrant workers. Plans were also being put forward for a mandatory reserve fund contribution by companies at start-up.
As for the former Yijinli protesters, Yang said the workers who had received government payout seemed to have forgotten about their former colleagues being held by police.
A police officer who answered the phone at the Bao'an district police station confirmed that the detentions had been made during the protest.
"At that time we detained a few people who were making trouble. I can simply tell you that all the people we detained will be dealt with according to law, with all documentation approved by higher levels of leadership," he said.
"However, if there are any dissenting opinions from among the relatives about the way we are handling this, they can launch an appeal at the Shenzhen Municipal People's Court," he added.
China's national police chief has called on police officers to mend relations with ordinary Chinese people, and to be careful of how they use force to settle disputes.
Original reporting in Cantonese by Hai Lan and in Mandarin by Gao Shan. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
By Christine Brennan | USA TODAY
October 30, 2008
China's government was so concerned about the possibility of athlete demonstrations in the Beijing Olympics that it created a list of nine U.S. athletes and one assistant coach it thought might cause trouble at the Games, according to an internal U.S. Olympic Committee e-mail obtained by USA TODAY.
The names included softball players Jennie Finch and Jessica Mendoza and soccer player Abby Wambach, who broke her leg and missed the Olympic Games. It also included two Paralympians, one athlete who wasn't a member of the 2008 softball team and a top female collegiate golfer. Golf is not an Olympic sport.
"We viewed these concerns as being entirely unjustified and unwarranted," USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said in an e-mail Wednesday. "As such, we rejected the request to address this with our athletes or transmit the letter to them. We saw absolutely no need to burden the athletes with this."
The list was given to USOC officials in a July 8 meeting by Shu Xiao, minister counselor for cultural affairs at the Chinese embassy in Washington, according to the e-mail.
"The subject matter had to do with information the Chinese have received regarding the intention of certain members of the U.S. Olympic team to stage some sort of demonstration at the Games, perhaps displaying banners or wearing apparel or wrist bands bearing political slogans," the e-mail stated. It added that Shu said "many of them" were "apparently associated with Team Darfur," an international coalition of athletes committed to raising awareness about the crisis in Darfur, Sudan.
"Shu appeared quite concerned over the prospect of such demonstrations and asked what we could do," according to the e-mail.
Seibel said the USOC "communicated to the Embassy in very clear terms that our athletes would have the same right to free speech and free expression, consistent with what is set forth in the Olympic Charter, that they have enjoyed at previous Games. We made certain those rights would in no way be infringed upon or compromised."
The USOC was concerned and alerted its team leaders of those sports in which athletes were named.There were no incidents involving the athletes in China, and after months of conversation about possible athlete protests over Darfur, Tibet or China's treatment of dissidents, none materialized at the Games.
"This may be the biggest compliment of my life," Wambach, a member of Team Darfur, said in a phone interview when informed of the list. "If they're worried about us, maybe we do have more strength as athletes and as people to speak out. This just gives me more empowerment."
"It doesn't surprise me but it makes me laugh," said Mendoza, who also is president-elect of the Women's Sports Foundation. "We're not burning our shirts and ranting and raving. We're just trying to help thousands of people from dying."
Phone calls to the Chinese embassy Wednesday afternoon went unanswered.
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