Chinas Human Rights Lawyers: Current Challenges and Prospects

---

Execution methods include lethal injections and shooting. Death sentences in post- Maoist mainland China can be politically or socially influenced. In , a local court sentenced the leader of a triad society to a death sentence with two years of probation. However, the public opinion was that the sentence was too light.

Navigation

Under public pressure, the supreme court of Communist China took the case and retried the leader, resulting in a death sentence, which was carried out immediately. The execution protocol is defined in criminal procedure law, under article In some areas of China, there is no specific execution ground. A scout team chooses a place in advance to serve as the execution ground. In such a case, the execution ground normally will have three perimeters: The public is generally not allowed to view the execution. The role of the executioner was fulfilled in the past by the People's Armed Police.

In recent times, the legal police force Chinese: Since , the most common method of execution has been execution by firing squad. This method has been largely superseded by lethal injection , using the same three-drug cocktail pioneered by the United States , introduced in Execution vans are unique to China, however. Lethal injection is more commonly used for 'economic crimes' such as corruption, while firing squads are used for more common crimes like murder. In , Chinese authorities moved to have lethal injection become the dominant form of execution; in some provinces and municipalities, it is now the only legal form of capital punishment.

Human rights groups and foreign governments have heavily criticised China's use of the death penalty for a variety of reasons, including its application for non-violent offences, allegations of the use of torture to extract confessions, legal proceedings that do not meet international standards, and the government's failure to publish statistics on the death penalty.

The Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong has accused Chinese hospitals of using the organs of executed prisoners for commercial transplantation. An estimate of over people are executed every year in China. Most of these executions are due to crimes that are seen as intolerable to China's society. There are some cases that have been held wrongly.

The execution was carried out on 3 May by the Intermediate People's Court. Three years later, Wei was officially declared innocent. An old man found a dismembered body, and police forensics claimed to have matched the body to the photo of the missing Shi Xiaorong.

China's Human Rights Lawyers: Current Challenges and Prospects

In , the missing woman returned to the village, saying she had been kidnapped to Shandong. The absolute innocence of the executed Teng was not admitted until In , ten years after the execution, Wang Shujin Chinese: Therefore, it has been indicated that Nie Shubin had been innocent all along. Although China outlawed torture in , human rights groups say brutality and degradation are common in Chinese arbitrary detention centres, Laojiao prisons and black jails. People who are imprisoned for their political views, human rights activities or religious beliefs have a high risk of being tortured.

The strategies are all quite inhumane conditions. In a specific case, a woman named Huang Yan was imprisoned for her political views and included the deprivation of medication. She had diabetes and ovarian cancer which required her to take medication in order to maintain order. Tests have shown that the ovarian cancer have spread throughout her body. In May , the PRC authorities officially passed new regulations in an attempt to nullify evidence gathered through violence or intimidation in their official judicial procedures, and to reduce the level of torture administered to prisoners already in jails.

Little is known, however, about whether or how procedures were modified in black jails, which are not officially part of the judicial system. The move came after a public outcry following the revelation that a farmer, convicted for murder based on his confession under torture, was in fact innocent. The case came to light only when his alleged victim was found alive, after the defendant had spent ten years in prison. There are 55 officially recognized native ethnic minorities in China.

Article 4 of the Chinese constitution states 'All nationalities in the People's Republic of China are equal', and the government argues that it has made efforts to improve ethnic education and increased ethnic representation in local government. Some groups are still fighting for recognition as minorities. In the Census, there were nationalities registered, of which the government recognized Some policies cause reverse racism , in which Han Chinese or even ethnic minorities from other regions are treated as second-class citizens in the ethnic region.

Stern punishments of independence-seeking demonstrators, rioters, or terrorists [] have led to mistreatment of the Tibetan and Uyghur minorities in Western China. The United States in refused to help repatriate five Chinese Uyghur Guantanamo Bay detainees because of 'past treatment of the Uigur minority'. Congress, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China said the Chinese government "provides incentives for migration to the region from elsewhere in China.

Chinese authorities in western Xinjiang province are collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, eye scans and blood types of millions of people aged 12 to Coercion to give blood sample is gross violation of the human rights and individual privacy. Tibetans who opposed the diversion of irrigation water by Chinese authorities to the China Gold International Resources mining operations were detained, tortured and murdered.

Conflicting reports about Tibetan human rights have been produced since then. The PRC claims that Tibet has been enjoying a cultural revival since the s, whereas the Dalai Lama says 'whether intentionally or unintentionally, somewhere cultural genocide is taking place'. Following the Chinese economic reform , businesspeople from other parts of China have made many business trips to Tibet, although most do not stay in region.

The New York Times has cited this ethnic diversity in Tibet as a cause of "ethnic tensions". It has also disagreed significantly with the promotion by PRC authorities of home ownership in nomadic Tibetan societies. The National People's Congress enacted a law in to protect private property, with the exception of land. Nevertheless, according to Der Spiegel magazine, local Chinese authorities have used brutal means to expropriate property, in a bid to profit from the construction boom.

In , homosexuality was removed from the official list of mental illnesses in China. According to the criminal law of China, only females can be victims of rape, a man who has been raped cannot accuse the rapists who can be men or women of rape. However, the criminal law of China had been amended in August thus males can be victims of indecency, but the articles on the criminal law which are related to rape still remain unrevised, so male rape victims can only accuse the rapists of indecency.

Intersex people in China suffer discrimination, lack of access to health care and coercive genital surgeries. Workers' rights and privacy are contentious human rights issues in China. There have been several reports of core International Labour Organization conventions being denied to workers. One such report was released by the International Labor Rights Fund in October ; it documented minimum wage violations, long work hours, and inappropriate actions towards workers by management. The extent to which these organizations can fight for the rights of Chinese workers is disputed.

The policy toward refugees from North Korea is a recurring human rights issue. It is official policy to repatriate these refugees to North Korea, but the policy is not evenly enforced and a considerable number of them stay in the People's Republic. Though it is in contravention of international law to deport political refugees, as illegal immigrants their situation is precarious.

Their rights are not always protected, [] and some are tricked into marriage or prostitution. African students in China have complained about their treatment in China. Their complaints largely ignored until —9, when 'students rose up in protest against what they called "Chinese apartheid ' ".

The United Nations reports that it has had difficulty in arranging official visits to China by UN Special Rapporteurs on various human rights issues. The Government of the People's Republic of China has argued that its concept of ' Asian values ' [] requires that the welfare of the collective should always be put ahead of the rights of any individual whenever conflicts between these arise.

Its position is that the government has the responsibility to design, implement and enforce a ' harmonious socialist society ' [] and a ' people's democratic dictatorship '.

The People's Republic of China emphasizes state sovereignty, which at times conflicts with the international norms or standards of human rights. However, its concept of human rights has developed radically over the years. From to the late s, the CPC focused on promoting the rights of the masses: Deng Xiaoping went as far to say that the right of a nation, or sovereignty guoquan is more important than human rights renquan , and right of subsistence shengcun quan is more fundamental than political freedom.

In , China officially accepted the idea that human rights were compatible with Chinese socialism, and in the state created the China Society for Human Rights Studies, which has represented Chinese positions on human rights in international forums, conferences, and media. China has adopted measures that would uphold certain human rights policies within their socialist environment.

The government still questions the international human rights norm, and emphasizes sovereignty over human rights. The PRC is concerned that Western states may be using the concepts of human rights and democracy to justify power politics. PRC official statements have argued that their principle of a people's democratic dictatorship is an apt measure to enforce the compromises they deem necessary to counter these conflicting interests.

Those who agree with this position believe that governments with constitutionally determined and restricted authority who grant their citizens the degree of freedom and liberty present in most free nations fail to take on the responsibility of regulating these conflicting interests. This position is highly controversial. Those who agree with the Chinese Communist Party point towards what they call rapid deterioration in Western societies, claiming that there has been an increase in geographic, religious and racial segregation, rising crime rates, family breakdown, industrial action, vandalism, and political extremism within Western societies.

The European Union and the United Nations claim to be stopping these types of human rights violations, save for a few violations committed by some Western governments e. The PRC holds the opinion, though, that many alleged negatives about democratic society are a direct result of an excess of individual freedom, saying that too much freedom is dangerous.

They say that these should be taken into account when assessing a country's human rights record. On occasion they have criticised the United States policies, especially the human rights reports published by its State Department. They cite the opinion that the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, has also violated human rights laws, for example during the invasion of Iraq.

They respond to the CPC's accusations by reminding them that PRC administrative groups have been accused of operating labour camps that violate human rights laws , although often sanctioned by official PRC laws. The Communist Party of China strongly denies operating any labour camps or jails that violate the PRC's official laws, and counters that the NSA has been known to engage in warrantless phone hacking and wiretapping in the US and upon US citizens in other places.

The PRC government repeats the often ambiguously and confusingly stated opinion that human rights should encompass what its officials have labelled as ' economic standards of living and measures of health and economic prosperity'. In March , an amendment was officially made to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, officially yet ambiguously stating that 'The State respects and preserves human rights. State Department in , though the report indicated that there were still widespread human rights-related issues in the PRC.

In , the Chinese government began direct village elections to help maintain social and political order whilst facing rapid economic change. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the non-governmental organization, see Human Rights in China organization.

This article is about the People's Republic of China.

Main Content

For the Republic of China, see Human rights in Taiwan. This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. Learn how and when to remove these template messages.

This article's lead section does not adequately summarize key points of its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. Please discuss this issue on the article's talk page. The neutrality of this article is disputed.

Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. April Learn how and when to remove this template message. This article needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's layout guidelines. Please help by editing the article to make improvements to the overall structure. January Learn how and when to remove this template message.

This article contains weasel words: Such statements should be clarified or removed. Xi Jinping Communist Party leader: Xi Jinping Head of state: Xi Jinping Head of government: Li Keqiang Congress Chairman: Li Zhanshu Conference Chairman: Scientific Outlook on Development.

Email Button

Constitution Previous constitutions Xu Qiliang Zhang Youxia. National Defense Mobilization Commission. Zhao Kezhi State Councilor. Xi Jinping Deputy Leader: Central Foreign Affairs Commission Director: Xi Jinping Deputy Director: Administrative divisions Hukou system Family planning Ethnic minorities. Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China. Freedom of association and Labour law. Freedom of religion in China. Persecution of Christians in China.

Persecution of Falun Gong. Organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China. Capital punishment in the People's Republic of China. For the former imperial Chinese bureau associated with judicial torture, see Ministry of Justice imperial China. For methods of torture associated with China, see bamboo torture , Chinese water torture , death by a thousand cuts lingchi , and tickle torture. Human rights in Tibet. This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. Intersex rights in China. Human rights portal China portal. Archived from the original on 9 December Archived from the original on 14 January Retrieved 13 January Christians and lions The Economist".

Archived from the original on 13 January Walking on Thin Ice 28 April Retrieved 23 August Washington Journal of Modern China.

Archived from the original PDF on 19 October Retrieved 5 March Retrieved 22 August The New York Times. Retrieved 9 May Archived from the original PDF on Archived from the original on 15 September Retrieved 18 September Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco, facing attack in Congress, say they're doing more good than harm in China". Internet Companies Aid Censorship". Retrieved 6 February Archived from the original PDF on 30 September Retrieved 22 September Retrieved 26 August Retrieved 3 October Archived from the original on 14 August Archived from the original on 5 March Retrieved 2 March How Censorship Works in China: Retrieved 30 August Archived from the original on 20 February Retrieved 1 May Retrieved 22 March China" Archived 19 August at the Wayback Machine.

The China Quarterly Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. Archived from the original on 2 September Migrant labourers, numbering in hundreds of millions, who have been ejected from state concerns and co-operatives since the s as China instituted "socialist capitalism", have to have six passes before they are allowed to work in provinces other than their own. In many cities, private schools for migrant labourers are routinely closed down to discourage migration. The household registration system hukou system A worker seeking to move from rural agricultural employment to urban non-agricultural work would have to apply through the relevant bureaucracies, and the number of workers allowed to make such moves was tightly controlled.

The enforcement of these controls was closely intertwined with state controls on essential goods and services. For instance, unauthorized workers could not qualify for grain rations, employer-provided housing, or health care. Most migrant workers live in crowded dormitories provided by the factories or in shanties. Their transient existence is precarious and exploitative. The discrimination against migrant workers in the Chinese case is not racial, but the control mechanisms set in place in the so-called free labor market to regulate the supply of cheap labor, the underlying economic logic of the system, and the abusive consequences suffered by the migrant workers, share many of the characteristics of the apartheid system.

China's Workers Under Assault: Police carry out raids periodically to round up those tho do not possess a temporary residence permit. Those without papers are placed in detention centres and then removed from cities. Globalization and Patterns of Labour Resistance , Routledge, , p.

Discrimination against rural migrants is China's apartheid: Certainly, the discrimination against the country-born is China's form of apartheid. It is an offence against human rights on a much bigger scale than the treatment of the tiny handful of dissidents dogged enough to speak up against the state. China's apartheid-like system of residency permits. However, the Ministry of Public Security has continued to justify the hukou system as an instrument for keeping public order the ministry said it allowed the police to track down criminals more easily and for providing demographic data for planning and program formulation.

Sofield and Li, Fung Mei Sarah: Archived from the original on 6 September Destombes "martire bianco" della Chiesa cambogiana". Archived from the original on 27 September See in particular section 8, paragraph 12; and section 10, paragraph 6. Retrieved 2 April Archived from the original on 2 April Retrieved 6 December Balancing Foreign and Domestic Policy Imperatives".

Archived from the original on 10 February Retrieved 24 December Three Portraits of Change in Modern China. Party and society relations in the modern era', Journal of Contemporary China, Retrieved 10 April Constructive Partner or Emerging Threat? Retrieved 15 October A Clash of Civilizations". Indian Journal of Asian Affairs. Modern China Special Issue: New and Old Diversities in Contemporary China. Watchdogs denounce detention of US-based reporters' family members in China".

Hong Kong Free Press. Retrieved 4 March Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine. Archived from the original PDF on 26 July On Dissidents and Madness: Real Change or Rhetoric? Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal. The Monthly Magazine on all Aspects of Tibet. Will our legal training in the United States impact the future of the Chinese legal landscape? Will young legal talents become interested in the separation of power, possible redistribution of power in the Chinese context, and perhaps even civil rights? Or will they just become yet another elite, depoliticized Chinese circle, collaborating with the state for personal status and material gain?

The Sun Zhigang incident generally is viewed as a milestone in the development of rights defense in China. In the wake of this incident, moderate lawyers refined rights defense strategies and applied them with limited success on issues such as anti-discrimination, property rights, and criminal procedure.

At the same time, they advanced broader arguments about constitutionalism and the need for meaningful legal restraints on the Party-state. Senior leaders identified the rights defense movement as a potential threat early on. Over the decade that followed, a confluence of two trends narrowed space for rights defense actions and expanded the group of rights activists that Chinese leaders viewed as falling within the category of enemy forces.

As concern about threats to social stability intensified, Chinese leaders launched campaigns to shore up the loyalty of political-legal institutions and incorporate these institutions into a system-wide stability maintenance network. At the same time, rights defense lawyers began to organize more overtly and to push political-legal boundaries through their advocacy on a range of sensitive cases and issues. The wave of citizen activism crested in , when thousands of citizens signed a broad call for constitutional government called Charter Efforts to contain the rights defense movement have intensified under Xi Jinping.

The wave of detentions this past weekend is just the latest step in this sustained effort. What political-legal space remains for rights defense lawyers? In the early s, there was considerable optimism that some Chinese lawyers had identified a middle ground within which Chinese leaders would tolerate some moderate citizen pressure and legal advocacy. Even as this space constricted over the past decade, petitions from rights lawyers and legal scholars contributed to some meaningful legal reforms. I think we need to consider a different possibility.

It manifests his neo-totalitarian ambitions — trying to reclaim control of all aspects of society, which requires that all social activities must be reconceived and reorganised along corporatist lines, and under the firm leadership of the ruling party. The law, with its natural affinity to deep controversy played out in public, is a particularly important area to be brought under control. In recent years, human rights advocates in China have developed new strategies to take the action from inside courtrooms out to social media and the streets.

Legal advocacy, in their eyes, becomes political resistance. The ongoing crackdown is unprecedented in terms of its scope and methods. Earlier crackdowns happened much less in the public eye. But this time around, authorities denounced human rights lawyers all over national media. In being so public and assertive, the authorities have signaled to a broad swath of society, including the wider legal profession, that they want to stop effective human rights advocacy.

They have also shown themselves brazenly unconcerned about the illegality of some of their methods. Besides repeated use of forced disappearances, they even held a year-old child for two days with no legal justification when his parents — Fengrui Law Firm employees Wang Yu and her husband Bao Longjun — were swept up in the current crackdown. It is perhaps testimony to the strength of the human rights lawyer movement that the campaign we now see unfolding is so large in scope , with not only dozens detained or ominously out of reach, but also nearly a hundred lawyers taken in for questioning and warned they are not to advocate for their already-detained friends.

Some of them have lived with persecution for many years. They have been put under surveillance, harassed, abducted, detained, tortured, placed under house arrest, and some have been sent to prison.

Search form

The spirit of professional solidarity, which the party is clearly trying to break, can help people live with fear but not entirely dispel it. On a trip to China in May and June, I spoke to several of the lawyers now detained or disappeared, and already sensed more of that fear, even though it was not often expressed. It is difficult to tell what longer-term consequences might be. While its scale is indeed unusual, one could argue that the scale was made necessary by targeting Fengrui Law Firm, which is similarly unusual among Chinese rights-focused legal practices in the scope and scale of its operations.

The way that the crackdown was conducted, including the specific allegations and propaganda issued in party-controlled newspapers, is not substantially different from how other arrests and detentions have been conducted since One could even argue that the government has been playing a predominantly reactive role in recent years:

• Pourquoi les thérapies énergétiques fonctionnent (French Edition)
• Primary School KS1 (Key Stage 1) Maths - Mental Maths - Ages 5-7 eBook
• 120 Timeless Golf Lessons – How to Improve Your Golf Swing and Play Your Best Golf in Just 30 Days
• Training ohne Geräte: Fit mit dem 3D-System (Trainieren mit dem eigenen Körpergewicht) [E-Book inkl. Code für HD-Videotraining] (German Edition)
• Turning your life into a success