CHINA: With two years to go until the Olympic Games come to Beijing, China has failed to meet the promises it made on human rights when awarded the event, Amnesty International says, while serious violations continue to be reported.
In a 20-page report issued yesterday, Amnesty said grassroots human rights activists were still being held and imprisoned, while official controls over the media and the internet were growing tighter.
"While there have been some positive legislative and judicial changes in connection with the application of the death penalty, progress appears to have stalled in connection with other punishments, including "Re-education through Labour" (RTL) and other abusive forms of administrative detention," Amnesty said.
Rights activists have been concerned about a number of cases of late. In August, Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights lawyer who exposed a violent campaign of forced abortions and sterilisations by family planning officials, was given four years in jail on what his supporters claimed were trumped up charges of damaging property and organising a mob to disrupt traffic during a protest.
Meanwhile, Straits Times journalist Ching Cheong was jailed for spying for Taiwan after a closed-door trial in Beijing.
Amnesty has focused on a list of top concerns in the run-up to the Olympics. These include the continued use of the death penalty and abusive forms of imprisonment, as well as the imprisonment and torture of human rights activists, including journalists and lawyers. Censorship of the internet also continues to be a problem, it said, with websites being shut down and bloggers muzzled. Some internet journalists have been jailed.
"Amnesty International considers that positive reforms in all of these areas are essential if China is to live up to its promises to improve human rights."
Last month the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China issued a report saying widespread detentions of foreign journalists showed China was still unprepared for the arrival of more than 20,000 international journalists for the opening of the Olympics on August 8th, 2008.
Since 2004, the club received reports of 72 incidents of harassment involving journalists from 15 countries, including the detention of foreign journalists on at least 38 occasions, mostly while covering stories related to social issues such as anti-pollution protests, land disputes, and the plight of Aids victims. On 10 occasions reporters and their sources suffered physical harassment.