The Thailand expat forum for Travel, Lifestyle and Fun.

dirtydog

By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing


Former inmates claim they were beaten and raped in the jails

China is running a number of unlawful detention centres in which its citizens can be kept for months, according to campaign group Human Rights Watch.

It says these centres - known as black jails - are often in state-run hotels, nursing homes or psychiatric hospitals.

Among those detained are ordinary people who have travelled to Beijing to report local injustices.

The government has denied black jails are used, despite previous reports in state-run media on their existence.

'Punched and kicked'

The human rights group report, entitled An Alleyway in Hell, says ordinary people are often abducted off the streets and taken to illegal detention centres.

They are sometimes stripped of their possessions, beaten and given no information about why they have been detained.

Human Rights Watch said it collected information for the report by interviewing 38 detainees earlier this year.

"I asked why they were detaining me, and as a group [the guards] came in and punched and kicked me and said they wanted to kill me," one former detainee told the group.
Legal detention centres have also come in for criticism

"I loudly cried for help and they stopped, but from then on, I didn't dare [risk another beating]."

Many of those held are petitioners, people who travel to Beijing to present their complaints to the State Bureau for Letters and Calls.

This national government department is supposed to help ordinary people across the country redress their grievances.

But some petitioners are detained by plain clothes security officers when they arrive in Beijing.

The Human Rights Watch report cites unpublished local government documents to provide details on the economic structure underpinning the jails.

It says penalties are levied against local officials "who fail to take decisive action when petitioners from their geographical area seek legal redress in provincial capitals and Beijing".

The operators of the black jails receive cash payments of 150 yuan ($22; £13) to 200 yuan per person, "creating another incentive to employ forms of illegal detention", the report says.

"The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government's rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

Outcry over deaths

State-run media outlets have already reported the existence of black jails.

The China Daily last week carried a report about the trial of a black jail guard accused of raping a 20-year-old woman who had been detained.

Despite that, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Thursday denied that China had illegal detention centres.

"I can assure you that there are no so-called black jails in China," he said at a regular news briefing.

But when pressed on the issue he added that there were "existing problems" that were being dealt with.

Black jails are just one aspect of China's detention system that have come in for criticism over recent months.

There has been a public outcry over the numbers of deaths in prisons and detention centres, a situation the government has promised to stamp out.

Mid

dirtydog

China America same same

Mid

Labor Camp for Petitioning Activist
Reported by Luisetta Mudie.
2012-02-29

A court hands down the sentence following an expose of China's 'black jails.'


Chinese women petitioners kneeling as they cry outside a court in southwest China's Chongqing municipality, May 13, 2010.
AFP

Authorities in Beijing have sentenced a veteran activist to 18 months in a labor camp after he led journalists to one of the government's unofficial detention centers, known as "black jails," rights campaigners said.

Liaoning petitioner Zhao Zhenjia was handed the labor camp sentence in recent days, following his detention by Beijing police on Jan. 22, the China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) website said.

The group said his punishment could be linked to his exposure of illegal detentions of ordinary Chinese with complaints against the government, but that Zhao had also attracted police attention for planning a Lunar New Year party for petitioners in the capital, many of whom are homeless and reduced to begging for survival.

"Beijing police took Zhao into custody on Jan. 22 but reportedly did not send a detention notice to his family in Fushun City," CHRD said in an e-mailed statement on Wednesday.

"They also did not permit some of Zhao’s friends to visit him at the You'anmen police station," it said.

Zhao's sentence comes after a three-year stint of "re-education through labor" handed down in 2000 in connection with his petitioning activities.

Zhao has been petitioning the Chinese authorities for nearly 40 years to claim compensation for wrongful imprisonment during the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

While his verdict was overturned by the same court in 1985, under a reconciliation movement instigated by late former premier Hu Yaobang, Zhao was never given compensation.

Prior to Chinese New Year, Zhao reportedly led some journalists to a black jail, which led to the release of the petitioners detained there.

Indicted for 'fraud'

Meanwhile, authorities in China's eastern province of Anhui have indicted petitioner and activist Wang Xile on suspicion of “fraud” based on his alleged dealings with rural machinery workers, CHRD said.

Wang, 62, was detained last September by Mengcheng county police officers after he received payments from rural residents to help them write complaints, although he is believed to have refused the money.

"For many years, Wang has attracted the ire of local authorities by volunteering to help write petitioning materials for fellow citizens and also representing petitioners in their grievances," CHRD said.

China’s army of petitioners say they are repeatedly stonewalled, detained in “black jails,” beaten, and harassed by authorities if they try to take complaints against actions by local officials to higher levels of government.

Many have been trying to win redress for alleged cases of official wrongdoing—including forced evictions, beatings in custody, and corruption linked to lucrative land sales—for decades.

rfa.org

__________________
"Keeping quiet while monks and other peaceful protesters are murdered and jailed is not evidence of constructive engagement." - Arvind Ganesan, Human Rights Watch.

"I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check" - M.C. Escher

HermantheGerman

I'am shocked !

Mid

problem is that's exactly what allows them to continue

bsnub

Yes this is a fact. The super rich have taken and enslaved America the same as China. The income disparity is almost the same. Yet posters like komen, jet/minnie, boontard continue being enslaved to the dogma that we should just work hard...

Oh it should be key to note that jet/minnie and boontard are both on public assistance and national health care.

Fcuking hypocrites.

__________________
Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon/Minnie Maugham
jet: You a military boy, snubbie? I think not. I know you like to drink beer.
bsnub: Huh?

Μολὼν λαβέ
كافر

Ceburat1

I think both of you are full of shit. No compairison between China and America on anything. However, if you like China better fuck off and go there.

bsnub

Piss off and go watch fox news you simple minded slave.

billy the kid

^ .

Kurgen

Feel the love.

Rural Surin

Illegal prisons?

What exactly does this mean?

And who made up this terminology?

alwarner

Certainly not in terms of Jesus love. Or manufacturing.

hazz

Some enterprising chaps decided that there was money to be made doing a kind of reverse kidnap. you tell them how you want them to kidnap and they get them and keep then for as long as you pay.

the central communist party is nowhere as corrupt as the local parties. but it has little visibility or control over what these local parties get up to, the local parties don't want local people petitioning the central party and drawing attention to the local parties corruption. so they enthusiastically hire the services of these kidnappers.

HermantheGerman

Remember the phrase: "When Wall Street coughs Europe catches a cold". Well, things have changed a bit and we are all licking the dragons ass.
When China says N O it means N O !


or let me phrase it another way:
China is allowed to open another 100 secret prisons if they buy the Airbus

Latindancer

Read this :
The 70 Richest Members Of China's 'Congress' Are Worth $83 Billion - Yahoo!7 Personal Finance

Mid

only because we the great unwashed are too apathetic en mass to petition for change

Bettyboo

^ America or China?

Mid

both , neither

change born of acceptance that the current path is unsustainable and the future generations deserve our best .

Rural Surin

The sad truth is that the prison industrial complex has grown into big big business.....everywhere, regardless of political ideologies of the respective country.

One will find that the societies that retain the largest percentage of inmates and prisoners of every sort are the obvious [worst] offenders.

Pulling the judicial and policing systems into the clan becomes fodder for development.

__________________
" Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology, it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things......natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity."

Mid

China backs down from legalising secret detentions
8/03/2012

China has abandoned controversial plans to make it legal to "disappear" people without trace, in a move hailed as a victory for judicial reformers.


Police patrol outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 3, 2012. China has abandoned controversial plans to make it legal to "disappear" people without trace, in a move hailed as a victory for judicial reformers.

A list of proposed amendments to China's existing criminal law, being debated this week by the National People's Congress, or parliament, originally included a clause that would legalise secret detentions.

Activists said the clause -- which stipulated those suspected of terrorism or endangering national security could be taken away to secret locations without their families knowing -- equated to legalising rights violations.

But in the final draft of the amended Criminal Procedure Law seen by AFP on Thursday, that clause had been removed.

"The removal of the disappearance clause is a victory for legal reformers in China and a defeat of the security apparatus' attempt to further cement its power," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

"The revisions point in the right direction, and, should Beijing decide so, offer a concrete avenue for progress in the administration of justice."

There are three different ways of locking up suspects in China before trial -- formal arrests, detentions and residential surveillance at home or in other locations.

In the first two cases, suspects are locked up in formal areas of detention such as police stations or prisons, which people know about.

But in cases of "residential surveillance" in other locations, suspects can be taken away to places such as guesthouses or hotels and held there for months.

If the controversial change had been included in the amended law, police would not have had to notify family members of the whereabouts of a suspect being held in an undisclosed location in terrorism or national security cases.

"If they hold you in a police station or prison, it's not good," said Bequelin.

"But it's still very different from being kidnapped in the middle of the night, and put in a guesthouse somewhere and kept there for months."

The practice of these so-called "enforced disappearances" already exists in China, but the amendment would have given it legal clout.

The proposal triggered an uproar when it was first publicised in August, and prominent activist Hu Jia compared it to methods used by the former Soviet Union's KGB secret police.

bangkokpost.com