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China Daily Assaults Prisoner
Abuses.
Bolded the WTF?!!
March 25, 2009
China Daily Assails Prisoner Abuses
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Inmates in China’s 2,700 pretrial detention centers suffer bullying and torture at the hands of fellow prisoners and police officers, and some experts want a neutral body to take the centers out of police control to curb the abuses, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper noted that the Communist Party’s latest four-year plan for legal reforms does not contemplate changes in the detention system. The full-page article said that since February 8, five inmates had died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Amnesty International, the human-rights advocacy group, last week reported two additional deaths that the police say were due to illness. Family members dispute those explanations.
All seven deaths occurred in police detention centers, where inmates accused of crimes can be held for months awaiting trial or formal charges. The centers are officially run by the national public-security ministry, but are effectively controlled by local police officials who, one expert was quoted as saying, regard them “as part of their turf and the most profitable piece of their territory.”
Another criminal procedure expert, Chen Weidong of Renmin University, was quoted as saying that officers “will sometimes have the detained suspects, especially new ones, tortured so that they can get confessions and complete an investigation as soon as possible.”
The centers drew national attention and outrage last month after a 24-year-old inmate in Yunnan Province, Li Qiaoming, died of brain injuries. Officials first said he had hit his head while playing “elude the cat,” a hide-and-seek game in which the seeker is blindfolded, with other prisoners. An investigation revealed that he had been beaten to death by three other inmates, and six police officials at the center were dismissed or punished.
Since then, six other inmates have died in custody, including one 18-year-old from Hunan Province whom local Communist Party officials said became unwell while being interrogated.
Police officials have said that three inmates died of illness. But in one of those cases, family members say, the body of a Hebei inmate said to have died of pneumonia had bruises and a broken tooth, evidence of beating. The other two cases remain in dispute.
China’s state-appointed legislature, the National People’s Congress, established a committee to investigate the centers during its meeting earlier this month, and the newspaper said it recently conducted surprise inspections in Liaoyuan, a city in Jilin Province.
But most experts believe the only way to significantly reduce abuses is to remove centers from the authority of the local police. “That has always been resisted by police departments,” Hou Xinyi, deputy dean of the law school at Nankai University in Tianjin, was quoted as saying. The police, he said, “complain such a reform will not help their investigations and the crackdown on crime.”
Amnesty International argued in a March 20 statement that the problems in the detention centers are symptoms of a larger lack of accountability and fairness in China’s justice system, in part because inmates frequently have little access to lawyers or even family visits. The organization called on the Chinese government to change its criminal procedure law to explicitly ban the use of confessions obtained through torture or ill treatment.
China Daily Assails Prisoner Abuses
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Inmates in China’s 2,700 pretrial detention centers suffer bullying and torture at the hands of fellow prisoners and police officers, and some experts want a neutral body to take the centers out of police control to curb the abuses, the state-run English-language newspaper, China Daily, reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper noted that the Communist Party’s latest four-year plan for legal reforms does not contemplate changes in the detention system. The full-page article said that since February 8, five inmates had died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Amnesty International, the human-rights advocacy group, last week reported two additional deaths that the police say were due to illness. Family members dispute those explanations.
All seven deaths occurred in police detention centers, where inmates accused of crimes can be held for months awaiting trial or formal charges. The centers are officially run by the national public-security ministry, but are effectively controlled by local police officials who, one expert was quoted as saying, regard them “as part of their turf and the most profitable piece of their territory.”
Another criminal procedure expert, Chen Weidong of Renmin University, was quoted as saying that officers “will sometimes have the detained suspects, especially new ones, tortured so that they can get confessions and complete an investigation as soon as possible.”
The centers drew national attention and outrage last month after a 24-year-old inmate in Yunnan Province, Li Qiaoming, died of brain injuries. Officials first said he had hit his head while playing “elude the cat,” a hide-and-seek game in which the seeker is blindfolded, with other prisoners. An investigation revealed that he had been beaten to death by three other inmates, and six police officials at the center were dismissed or punished.
Since then, six other inmates have died in custody, including one 18-year-old from Hunan Province whom local Communist Party officials said became unwell while being interrogated.
Police officials have said that three inmates died of illness. But in one of those cases, family members say, the body of a Hebei inmate said to have died of pneumonia had bruises and a broken tooth, evidence of beating. The other two cases remain in dispute.
China’s state-appointed legislature, the National People’s Congress, established a committee to investigate the centers during its meeting earlier this month, and the newspaper said it recently conducted surprise inspections in Liaoyuan, a city in Jilin Province.
But most experts believe the only way to significantly reduce abuses is to remove centers from the authority of the local police. “That has always been resisted by police departments,” Hou Xinyi, deputy dean of the law school at Nankai University in Tianjin, was quoted as saying. The police, he said, “complain such a reform will not help their investigations and the crackdown on crime.”
Amnesty International argued in a March 20 statement that the problems in the detention centers are symptoms of a larger lack of accountability and fairness in China’s justice system, in part because inmates frequently have little access to lawyers or even family visits. The organization called on the Chinese government to change its criminal procedure law to explicitly ban the use of confessions obtained through torture or ill treatment.