CHINA:CHINESE POLICE dragged a British journalist away from a pro-Tibet protest yesterday, in an incident that looks set to re-open the debate about interference with media freedom at the Beijing Olympics.
Police hauled John Ray, China correspondent for Independent Television News (ITN), from a park less than a kilometre from the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium to a nearby restaurant, where they threw his shoes in the corner and sat on his arms, shortly after foreign protesters unfurled a pro-Tibet banner.
"I wonder how this fits in with their solemn promise of free and unrestricted reporting," Mr Ray said on the telephone shortly after he was released.
Mr Ray, who is fully accredited to report in Beijing during the Olympic Games, said he was detained for around 20 minutes and his equipment bag was confiscated, despite repeated protestations in Chinese that he was a journalist.
He was thrown into a police van, the back of his trousers and shirt were covered in grime and he had bruising on his hand from where a police officer stood on it, he said.
Cameraman Ben England was also manhandled and prevented from filming the protest by police.
A pro-Tibetan independence group, Students for a Free Tibet, said two of their protesters who unfurled the banner were arrested immediately, while six other members of the group were also detained for protesting nearby.
Last month, the Beijing Olympic organisers said they were introducing three "protest parks" where anyone who wanted to express their opinions could do so. However, the demonstrations require approval and any protests that might harm "national unity" and "national, social or collective interests" are forbidden.
When it was awarded the right to stage the Games in 2001, China pledged to allow foreign media to report just as they would anywhere in the world, but the government has been criticised for continuing to stop journalists from reporting on sensitive issues, such as Tibet and Xinjiang.
Last year the government removed travel restrictions on resident foreign correspondents, a move that was broadly welcomed, although Tibet itself remains largely closed to international media.
Rights groups have also been critical of how greater freedom for foreign media has not been matched with similar freedoms for domestic journalists.
Since the Games started, there have been a number of incidents in which journalists had been harassed and prevented from working by police including one in central Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Last week, two Japanese journalists were forcibly detained and beaten up by police in northwest China, where they were reporting on a violent attack blamed on Muslim Uighur separatists.
The visiting press corps was furious when it arrived in China to discover that internet access at the main Olympic media centre was censored. Some sites were subsequently made accessible, but many sites, including any relating to Tibetan independence or the banned spiritual movement the Falun Gong, remain inaccessible to journalists.
The British embassy expressed "strong concern" to the Chinese authorities about the incident while the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) in Beijing demanded that police apologise to the ITN reporter.
"The FCC is appalled by this treatment of an accredited journalists within half a mile of the main Olympic stadium,"said FCC president Jonathan Watts.
"We call on the authorities to return his equipment, to apologise and if it is proved that a crime has been committed, to punish those responsible," he said.