By Jane Macartney
BEIJING, June 2 (Reuter) - Beijing on Friday attacked the award of the Golden Pen of Freedom to a journalist jailed for stealing state secrets as wanton interference in China's internal affairs.
"Gao Yu is a criminal, who was sentenced to imprisonment for stealing and leaking key state secrets, and damaging national security," Foreign Ministry spokesman Chen Jian said of the journalist jailed last November for six years.
The award of the Golden Pen of Freedom to Gao Yu by the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers on Monday "not only constitutes wanton interference in China's internal affairs, but blasphemes the internationally recognised principles of press freedom," Chen said.
Arrested in 1989 after the crushing of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Gao, 51, was freed after 14 months in detention without trial and suddenly rearrested last year on the eve of her planned departure to Columbia University in New York. She was jailed after a secret trial on charges of passing state secrets to foreigners.
Chen also attacked a report issued on Friday by the London-based human-rights group Amnesty International which said Beijing's round-up of dissidents before the sixth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown marked the latest phase in China's worsening human-rights offences.
"Amnesty International has always harboured a deep prejudice against China, and has been attacking China for no apparent reason," Chen said. China's government fully ensures basic freedom and human rights for all its nationalities, he said.
"The Tibetan people, just as other nationalities in the country, enjoy human rights and basic freedom, both of which have been improving. This is a fact for all to see, and will not be altered by lies or slanders," Chen said.
The Amnesty report cited persecution of religious believers who refuse to join official churches, torture of anti-Chinese monks and nuns in Tibet, heavy prison terms for independent labour activists and unfair trials as some alleged abuses.
It identified a new Beijing policy in early 1994 that stressed the need for political stability to protect economic development as the source of the harsh action against people whose ideas differed from those of the ruling Communist Party.
Under that tougher approach, hundreds of members of religious groups and dissidents were detained, many held without charges, and some sentenced to jail terms of as long as 20 years for openly voicing their views, it said.
Dozens have been arrested or harassed in the past few days in a nationwide sweep of potential troublemakers in the run-up to the sixth anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown, it said. Troops poured into Beijing to crush student-led protests for democracy centred in Tiananmen Square on that day.
The Amnesty report alleged there was torture and frequent beatings in prison and labour camps and that several prisoners in Tibet had died following ill-treatment.
London-based Tibet Information Network said this week a 15-year-old Tibetan nun died on May 15 in hospital near her home three months after being released at the end of a three-year jail term for taking part in a pro-independence demonstration.
