Contents
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1. Row ends over China's meeting site
3. Police Strip-Search Tourists in Hunt for Letters (TIN)
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1. Row ends over China's meeting site
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BEIJING, June 9 (UPI) -- The dispute over the site of an international
women's forum ended Friday with the China Organizing Committee agreeing to
closed-circuit television and a bus shuttle service linking the participants
with the U.N. Women's Conference in the capital.
After two days scrutinizing the venue for the Non-Governmental
Organizations' forum in Huairou and the site of the main conference in the
north of Beijing, Khunying Supatra Masdit said the committee "has made much
progress on all recommendations."
China's abrupt decision in April to shift the meeting site for the NGO
Forum from a sports complex in Beijing to Huairou more than an hour's drive
away sparked protests from women's groups accusing Beijing of trying to
suppress free expression and exert control over the event.
Forum organizers complained the facilities 40 miles (53 km) from Beijing
were too small. Last month the NGO Facilitating Committee visited Huairou and
asked the Chinese government to put forward an alternative site.
China declined to do so in addition to excluding delegates of groups
representing Tibet and Taiwan.
While China said the original site, the huge Workers' Stadium, had
structural problems, sources in the capital said city officials were jittery
over the prospect of embarrassing protests.
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3. Police Strip-Search Tourists in Hunt for Letters (TIN)
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Two French women were detained and strip-searched by Chinese police in
Lhasa last month because they were believed to be carrying letters from
Tibetans. The two women and a Danish man were confined to their hotels
for up to six days before being made to sign confessions and told to
leave the country.
One of the women, a student from Paris, Francoise Robin, was stopped by
police at Lhasa airport on 29th April as she was about to board the
twice-weekly plane to Nepal. In the first reported case of this kind, she
was strip-searched by women police, who seized two letters which friends
had given to her to take to Nepal.
Searches of foreigners in Tibet are rare, except where an offence has
already been seen to have been committed, and strip searches are almost
unheard of. The case of Mis Robin indicates a shift in police strategy
towards increased surveillance and searches of targetted foreigners in
Tibet.
Ms. Robin, who says she has no involvement with any organisation or any
political activity connected to Tibet, had just completed 8 months on a
Tibetan language course at the University of Lhasa. Police appear to have
selected her for surveillance because she was one of the few foreign
residents of Lhasa who can speak Tibetan. An informed Tibetan source told TIN
that police had been watching Ms. Robin for some time.
Ms Robin, who studied Tibetan language at the Institut National des Langues
et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, had been given one of the letters by a
French tourist earlier the same morning to post in Nepal. The other letter
had been given to her by a Tibetan friend a few days earlier. Police seemed
to know that she was carrying the letters, as well as the identity of the
Tibetan friend, according to Ms Robin. The police team carried out only a
cursory check of her luggage, apparently expecting the letters to be carried
on her person, said the student.
The letter from Ms Robin's Tibetan friend, a nun, included news about a
recent demonstration inside Tibet. If identified, the nun risks serious
punishment for "leaking state secrets", an offence equivalent to espionage in
Chinese law.
Ms Robin was taken from the airport to a police station for four hours and
then to the Tibet Guesthouse, a state-owned hotel where she was confined to
the premises for three days and made to sign a document accepting
"residential surveillance", a form of quasi-voluntary house arrest, under
Article 38 of the Chinese Criminal Procedure Code, before being expelled to
Nepal.
