China Charges Prominent Human-Rights Lawyers With Subversion

TIME
The lawyers had been held in undisclosed locations since July
Chinese authorities have officially placed at least seven human-rights lawyers and their colleagues under arrestafter having detained them for six months, relatives and associates of the accused said on Tuesday.

Zhou Shifeng

The arrests include that of Zhou Shifeng, founder of Beijing’s Fengrui law firm that was the main target of a sweeping government crackdown last year, Agence France-Presse reported.

According to a social-media post by his colleague Liu Xiaoyuan, Zhou has been charged with “state subversion,” which carries a possible life sentence.

Zhou and more than 100 other lawyers, both from his firm and elsewhere, were detained in July in what many said was China’s toughest suppression of rights activists in several years. Chinese state media reported that Zhou had “confessed” to an unspecified crime a few days after his arrest, prompting fears that he was made to cooperate under duress.

“For the crime to become as serious as state subversion, it’s a completely political charge,” Liu told Reuters.

Others charged with subversion include a 24-year-old trainee lawyer, Li Shuyun, and Zhou’s colleague, Wang Quanzhang, with the latter’s sister confirming news of his arrest in an online post.

Legal assistant Zhao Wei, also 24, has meanwhile been charged with “incitement to state subversion” — a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison — according to her husband and mother, who cited a police notice. Similar notices were posted on the Internet by friends of lawyers Xie Yanyi, Xie Yang and Sui Muqing, indicating they have also been charged with incitement.

The notices show that Zhou, Zhao and Li are being held at a detention centre in the northern city of Tianjin. It is the first time since their disappearance six months ago that relatives and acquaintances have received any knowledge of their whereabouts.

North Korea - Kim regime expands secret prison camp for women forcibly returned from China

Fox News
The communist regime in North Korea has been expanding space for women in its notorious prison labor camps to accommodate the number of Koreans forcibly returned from China, where they had sought the economic means to survive.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un

The atrocities that await inmates in the North Korean gulag include forced labor, savage beatings, starvation, episodic executions and other crimes against humanity, according to a new report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (CHRNK), a Washington-based non-profit group.

The most recent changes in North Korea’s remote and extensive secret prison network is documented in The Hidden Gulag IV, an update of the Committee’s decade-long examination of the North Korean system, published on Friday. The report is buttressed by a separate analysis of satellite photographs and based on interviews with inmates who endured stays in the horrific system and subsequently escaped to South Korea after their release.

The Kim regime steadfastly denies the existence of any and all of the camps.

>>> Continues to read the article

China to review murder case 19 years after execution

Xinhua

Beijing - China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) has decided to review a rape-murder case 19 years after the convict was executed, as another man insists he is is guilty.

Shandong Higher People's Court will review the case of Nie Shubin and Wang Shujin. Nie was executed in 1995 at the age of 21 for the 1994 rape and murder of a woman in Hebei's provincial capital, Shijiazhuang.

Wang Shujin, 47, was apprehended by police in 2005 for three unconnected rape and murder cases, and confessed to the rape and murder of the same woman in Nie's case.

Wang, sentenced to death in March 2007, claimed that he raped and murdered a woman in a cornfield on the outskirts of Shijiazhuang in 1994 and Nie was innocent. 

Hebei Higher People's Court, which approved the death penalty on Nie in 1995, did not believe his claim in a retrial last year and Nie's verdict still stands.

Wang's claims have raised public questions of judicial impartiality.

The review of Nie's case is aimed at "ensuring judicial fairness and responding to public concerns," according to the SPC's announcement.

Dui Hua Foundation: China 'executed 2,400 people in 2013', a fall of 20 per cent from 2012

The Economic Times
The world's top executioner China put 2,400 people to death last year, a US based rights group said Tuesday, shedding rare light on a statistic Beijing considers a state secret.
The figure was a fall of 20 per cent from 2012, the Dui Hua Foundation said, and a fraction of the 12,000 in 2002.

China is so reticent on the issue that it has done nothing to publicise the long-term decline in its use of the death penalty. But it still executes more people than every other country put together, rights groups say.

The total for the rest of the world combined was 778 people in 2013, according to campaign group Amnesty International's annual report earlier this year. It does not give an estimate for Chinese executions.

Dui Hua said that it obtained its figures from "a judicial official with access to the number of executions carried out each year".

But the recent annual declines were "likely to be offset" this year, it said, due to factors including the "strike hard" campaign in the violence-wracked largely Muslim region of Xinjiang.

Hundreds of people have been convicted of terrorist offences in the area, and last week a court condemned 12 to death in connection with a July attack.

"China currently executes more people every year than the rest of the world combined, but it has executed far fewer people since the power of final review of death sentences was returned to the (Supreme People's Court) in 2007," Dui Hua said.

China's top court examines all death sentences issued in the country, and sent back 39 per cent of those it reviewed last year to lower courts for additional evidence, Dui Hua said, citing a report by the Southern Weekly newspaper.

The Chinese legal system is tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party and courts have a near-100 per cent conviction rate in criminal cases.

The use of force to extract confessions remains widespread in the country, leading to a number of miscarriages of justice.

China has occasionally exonerated wrongfully executed convicts after others came forward to confess their crimes, or in some cases because the supposed murder victim was later found alive.

In one landmark case in June, the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence for Li Yan, a woman who killed her abusive husband.

China executes two Ugandans for drug trafficking

Death Penalty NewsUgandan Foreign Ministry spokesman Fred Opolot said two Ugandan drug traffickers – Omar Ddamulira and Ham Andrew Ngobi – had been executed in China’s Guandong Province.

Opolot added that Ddamulira was executed on 21 May while Ngobi was executed on 24 June in Guangzhou, a city populated by many Ugandan businessmen.

He said the Ugandan Government had attempted to engage the Chinese authorities, to try and stay their execution without luck.

According to Opolot the two men were allowed to speak to their families before they were executed.

In October 2013, a report by a delegation of Ugandan MPs to China revealed that 46 Ugandan inmates on death row or life imprisonment were languishing in Chinese Prisons.

Pena de Muerte en China. Rompe la muralla del silencio

Amnesty International

En China, miles de personas son ejecutadas cada año. Sin posibilidad de solicitar un indulto y posiblemente, tras haber confesado bajo coacción. ¡Actúa!

Acto en solidaridad con Li Yan,
condenada a muerte en China

Cualquier cálculo de personas condenadas a muerte y ejecutadas en China es una mera aproximación: se trata de un secreto de Estado. La falta de estadísticas oficiales públicas sólo permite hacer cálculos muy por debajo del número real. En el pasado, tanto expertos como representantes oficiales han calculado que la cifra rondaba muchos miles y, aunque fuera cierta la afirmación de que el número de ejecuciones ha disminuido desde que el Tribunal Supremo Popular empezó a revisar todos los casos de pena de muerte en 2007, los cálculos seguirían estando en torno a varios miles. En China se llevan a cabo, sin duda, más ejecuciones que en el resto del mundo en su conjunto.

Además, la pena capital se aplica por una amplia variedad de motivos. Hasta 55 delitos están castigados con la muerte. Si bien en 2011, el gobierno eliminó la pena de muerte para 13 delitos, la realidad es que aún son muchos los delitos que se siguen castigando con la muerte, muchos de ellos no violentos, como el tráfico de drogas o algunos de índole económico.

Sin embargo, los elevados índices de sentencias de muerte y ejecuciones no son el único motivo de preocupación: ninguna persona es sometida a un juicio justo en el país asiático. Se dictan sentencias basadas en “confesiones” obtenidas mediante tortura y no existe un procedimiento que permita presentar solicitud de indulto. Además, la policía, los fiscales y los tribunales no son independientes: siguen sujetos a la supervisión del Partido Comunista Chino y por tanto a injerencias políticas; no existe la presunción de inocencia ni el acceso sin demora a representación letrada. Los propios funcionarios chinos han admitido que el problema de las “confesiones falsas” es generalizado. Por último, un dato sorprendente que ilustra la falta de imparcialidad en todos los juicios chinos es que el índice de sentencias condenatorias en el país sea prácticamente del cien por cien.

Es necesario que la muralla de silencio que oculta la realidad de la pena de muerte en China caiga de una vez.

China to phase out use of executed prisoners' organs for transplants

South China Morning Post 
China will start phasing out its decades-long practice of using the organs of executed prisoners for transplant operations from November, a senior official said on Thursday, as it pushes to mandate the use of organs from ethical sources in hospitals.

China remains the only country in the world that still systematically uses organs extracted from executed prisoners in transplant operations, a practice that has drawn widespread international criticism. Many Chinese view the practice as a way for criminals to redeem themselves.

But officials have recently spoken out against the practice of harvesting organs from dead inmates, saying it “tarnishes the image of China”.

The health ministry will begin enforcing the use of organs from voluntary donors allocated through a fledging national programme at a meeting set to be held in November, former deputy health minister Huang Jiefu, who still heads the ministry’s organ transplant office, said.

“I am confident that before long all accredited hospitals will forfeit the use of prisoner organs,” Huang said.

The first batch of all 165 Chinese hospitals licensed for transplants will promise to stop using organs harvested from death row inmates at the November meeting, he added. Huang did not specify the exact number.

Meeting “accepted ethical standards”

An Australian-trained liver transplant surgeon, Huang said the China Organ Transplant Committee will ensure that the “source of the organs for transplantation must meet the commonly accepted ethical standards in the world”.

That effectively means the use of prisoner organs at approved hospitals will come to an end, but the timeframe remains indefinite, he added.

China has launched pilot volunteer organ donor programmes in 25 provinces and municipalities with the aim of creating a nationwide voluntary scheme by the end of this year.

By the end of last year, about 64 per cent of transplanted organs in China came from executed prisoners and the number has dipped to under 54 per cent so far this year, according to figures provided by Huang.

At a meeting in August last year, Huang, deputy health minister at the time, told officials that top leaders had decided to reduce dependency on prisoners’ organs, according to a transcript of the meeting.

Rights groups say many organs are taken from prisoners without their consent or their family’s knowledge, something the government denies.

So far, more than 1,000 organ donors have come through the new system, benefiting at least 3,000 patients, Huang said.

Voluntary organ donation in China has already risen from 63 cases in all of 2010 to a current average of 130 per month so far this year, Huang added.

However, not all donated organs are currently allocated through the new programme, leaving room for human interference, one of the main challenges the reform faces.

Supply still falls far short of demand due in part to the traditional Chinese belief that bodies should be buried or cremated intact. An estimated 300,000 patients are waitlisted every year for organ transplants and only about one in 30 ultimately will receive a transplant.

The shortage has driven a trade in illegal organ trafficking and in 2007 the government banned organ transplants from living donors, except spouses, blood relatives and step or adopted family members.

China - Arrested human rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong

The Guardian

Human rights campaigner reportedly held at Beijing jail on suspicion of gathering people to disturb public order

Xu Zhiyong, who has been calling for the release of activists
and campaigning against government abuses, was arrested
on Tuesday. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP

The Chinese lawyer Xu Zhiyong has been detained after calling for the release of activists and campaigning against government abuses, according to a rights group and a fellow lawyer.

Police also took computers and mobile phones from Xu's Beijing home,Human Rights in China said.

A scanned detention notice distributed by the New-York-based group said Xu was detained on Tuesday on suspicion of gathering people to disturb order in a public place.

No details or causes were given to support the vaguely defined charge, which is often used to punish people who speak out against abuses.

Teng Biao, another prominent Beijing human rights lawyer, confirmed Xu's detention for disturbing public order on Twitter. Teng said his telephone had been frozen and he could only communicate by computer.

Beijing police did not immediately answer faxed questions about Xu, who has campaigned for causes ranging from the closure of illegal detention centres to the public declaration of officials' personal assets.

Officers at Beijing's No 3 jail, where Xu was reportedly being held, said they were not permitted to speak to the media.

Xu has frequently been punished for his outspokenness with lengthy periods of house arrest, the most recent beginning on 12 April after he signed a letter in support of other detained activists.

China's Communist party rulers tolerate no challenge to their rule and frequently punish critics with lengthy prison sentences, such as the 11-year term given to the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo for co-authoring a call for sweeping political reforms.

Authorities say they protect citizens' legal rights and point to vast improvements in incomes and quality of life achieved over the past three decades.

Chinese TV Special on Executions Stirs Debate

The New York Times

In a live television broadcast that was part morality play, part propaganda tour de force, the Chinese government on Friday displayed four foreign drug traffickers, convicted of murdering 13 Chinese sailors two years ago, being led to their executions.

In this image taken from CCTV on Friday, Naw Kham, the Burmese ringleader of a drug gang, was transferred for execution in Yunnan Province, China.

Although the two-hour TV special came to an end shortly before the men were put to death by lethal injection, the program became an instantly polarizing sensation, with viewers divided on whether the program was a crass exercise in blood lust or a long-awaited catharsis for a nation outraged by the killings. Some critics said the program recalled the days when condemned prisoners were paraded through the streets before being shot.

“Rather than showcasing rule of law, the program displayed state control over human life in a manner designed to attract gawkers,” Han Youyi, a professor of criminal law, wrote on his microblog account. “State-administered violence is no loftier than criminal violence.”

One prominent rights lawyer insisted that the show, on the national broadcaster CCTV, violated the Chinese criminal code by making a spectacle of the condemned.

The program largely focused on Naw Kham, the Burmese ringleader of a drug gang, who was accused of orchestrating the brutal execution of the sailors in October 2011 as they sailed down the Mekong in Myanmar and then making the crime appear to be drug-related. In China, a nation where millions work overseas, often in dangerous corners of the world, the killings were especially unsettling.

Last April, six men accused in the killings, including Naw Kham, were apprehended in Laos by a team of investigators that included officers from China, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. Naw Kham and his accomplices were convicted last November during a two-day trial in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. The men, including a Laotian, a Thai and a third of “unknown nationality,” reportedly confessed to the crime. The two men who escaped execution received long prison terms.

Last month, a Chinese public security official told a newspaper that Beijing had considered using a drone strike to kill Naw Kham but later decided to capture him alive.

Given the considerable viewership on Friday, that decision proved to be a good one.

The program included interviews with triumphant police officers, images of the condemned men in shackles and the sort of blustery talking heads that would be familiar to American cable television audiences. The graphic elements that flashed behind the CCTV news anchor included the tagline “Kill the Kingpin.”

In one segment, Liu Yuejin, director general of the central government’s Narcotics Control Bureau, cast the executions as not only an important victory for a newly confident China but also for ethnic Chinese across the globe. “In the past, overseas Chinese dared not say they were of Chinese origin,” he said. “Now they can hold their heads high and be themselves.”

Supporters of the program were many, and enthusiastic. One blogger suggested that death by lethal injection was too lenient, adding “These beasts should be pulled apart by vehicles.”

Shortly before the men were led from their cells to the van that would take them to the death chamber, a reporter asked Naw Kham to talk about his family and then taunted him by showing photos of the victims’ grieving relatives. “I want to raise my children and have them educated,” Naw Kham said with a faint smile on his face. “I don’t want to die.”