17 May 1996 - Tibet Information Network

Within days of a UN decision not to criticise China's human rights record, a UN team of experts which has ruled that China is illegally detaining political prisoners has come under pressure from western governments to limit its investigations. Meanwhile a separate UN team of experts has ruled that reports of widespread torture in China are believable.

A UN resolution has implicitly criticised the experts who comprise the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, which was set up four years ago and last year investigated 755 cases, a ten-fold increase over the previous year. The Group had ruled that 697 of the cases it studied, mainly involving political dissidents, were illegally detained and should be released.

The published cases involved 22 countries, mostly with three or four cases in each, except for Bahrain, which was found to have 513 illegal detainees, and China, which had 68.

21 of the cases decided against China involved Tibetans, all of them Buddhist nuns held for "exercising their right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion" by staging demonstrations for independence or, in the case of 12 of them, for singing songs praising the Dalai Lama. 42 of the illegal detainees were Chinese democracy activists or trade union organisers and five were Uighur or Kazakh dissidents from Xinjiang, including the historian Turgun Almas and the novelist Kajikhumar Shabdan.

Last month France, Germany and Austria sponsored a resolution at the UN which is seen by UN officials as an attempt to limit the powers of the Working Group, the human rights body in the UN regarded as the most effective in identifying abuses. The resolution was co-sponsored by Austria, Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland and Belgium, and was passed without dissent.

The resolution told the Working Group, chaired by the French jurist Louis Joinet, to observe "the distinction between detention and imprisonment", a phrase which means it should stop investigating cases of detainees once they have received trials.

The Group, which has quasi-judicial powers and is one of the few human rights bodies in the UN to investigate rather than report on alleged abuses, currently studies cases after trial in countries where there is no provision for an independent judiciary or a fair trial. Most of the cases dealt with by the Group are of this type.

"There was a strong Cuban initiative to limit the mandate of the Working Group and this resolution was a compromise solution," said a human rights expert with close links to the Commission. "So far it is simply saying attention should be paid to this distinction, but if the Working Group does not do anything, next year it will be in real danger," said the expert, who asked not to be named.

The Working Group has to survive an annual vote at the UN Commission on Human Rights to continue its work and last year accused by China of "arbitrary attacks against sovereign states" and "bitter political prejudice" as part of a blockade by "certain western powers".

The pressure on the Group comes only days after the Commission decided not to criticise China's human rights record. On 23rd April the Commission decided by 27 votes to 20 not to consider a mildly worded resolution criticising China, the sixth year that China has avoided criticism in the UN since 1989, an achievement which was described in the Chinese press as a "big victory for China".

The resolution, which was widely perceived as an attempt by western nations to extend their influence, lost credibility as a human rights move after the US refused to condemn the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. Its possibilities of success had already been weakened by the refusal of France and Germany to endorse it until only a few days before the vote, apparently in the hope of improving trade opportunities with Beijing.

- China Criticised on Torture -

A second team of legal experts in the UN declared last week that reports of widespread torture in China are credible and has asked China to set up a genuinely independent judiciary and to change its laws so that torture is banned. "according to information supplied by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) torture may be practised on a widespread basis in China", said the UN Committee against Torture last Monday 6th May.

It expressed concern about reports of what it called "the special environment" in Tibet which appeared to have led to "conditions that result in alleged maltreatment and even deaths of persons held in police custody and in prisons in Tibet."

The Committee's recommendations include a request that China establish a rehabilitation centre for torture victims in Beijing and other cities in conjunction with the UN.

The Committee against Torture is more powerful than the Working Group because it is a legal body rather than a political organ, and has to assess member states' compliance with international laws which prohibit torture. Last week it considered China's four-yearly report on its implementation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Human or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty which China signed in 1986 and ratified in September 1988.

The 10-member panel of judges and legal experts on the Committee drew attention to reports that cases of police abuse in China "often did not result in investigations" and stated that some of China's methods of capital punishment might be in breach of international standards, a reference to reports of public parading of prisoners and alleged sale of prisoners' organs, which China denies.

The panel, which does not include any government representatives, noted some improvements in China's efforts to combat torture, mainly its reform of the Criminal Procedure Law announced in March, which from next January will reduce the length of time a suspect can be detained without charge from several months to 37 days. However, some Committee members disputed Chinese claims that the new laws provided a presumption of innocence, noting that they still require defence lawyers to prove that a suspect is innocent.

- Tibet Policeman Convicted -

The Committee also described as positive reports that a number of police officers had been prosecuted for acts of torture in China, referring to a recent case in Tibet where for the first known time a policeman has been convicted of beating a prisoner.

China's Procuratorial Daily had reported on 29th April that Chungdag, a Tibetan who was head of the county police force in Kyirong, Southern Tibet, had tied up, beaten and abused a Tibetan woman during a night-long torture session in January 1995, according to a Reuters report.

Tenzin Wangmo suffered injuries to the legs, buttocks, and wrists that required 65 days' treatment in hospital following the attacks by the police chief and two others, who had been acting on the request of a court official named Buchung, the newspaper said. It did not say if the accomplices were prosecuted but added that Chungdag was also convicted of illegally detaining four officials for 87 hours in November 1994.

The Committee did not comment on the fact that the Tibetan policeman was only given a suspended sentence. "Not all acts of torture and ill-treatment [in China] are punishable by law and the punishments, when imposed, are often light," Amnesty International said in its report to the Committee, which noted that torturers can receive as little as 15 days detention in Chinese law.

The Committee criticised China for failing to make all forms of torture illegal, despite an identical request by the same Committee three years ago. "There has been a failure to incorporate a definition of torture in China's domestic legal system in terms consistent with the provisions of the Convention", Peter Burns, the Canadian expert on the panel, told China on behalf of the Committee. Chinese criminal law only specifically bans torture that is used to extract confessions, whereas the Convention requires it to outlaw torture for any purpose, including intimidation, discrimination and punishment.

China's Ambassador Wu Jianmin said that international law is incorporated automatically in Chinese legislation. In China "the law deems torture to be a criminal act. There is no circumstance that may ever be invoked to justify its use," China stated in its report to the Committee.

- Role of NGOs -

Underlying the discussion between the Committee and Mr Wu was a debate over the role of non-governmental organisations, whose influence at the UN has been attacked by China as well as by other nations accused of human rights violations. Experts on the committee had earlier described reports from some human rights organisations as "sources that have proved to be very reliable".

The Ambassador said he felt "a bit uneasy" about some of the Committee's conclusions because the panel had relied on information provided by NGOs. "Their sources are those people called dissidents," Mr Wu told the committee. "These are people who make a living out of accusing and blaming China." He described Amnesty International as "a politically motivated organisation" and the prison reform campaigner Harry Wu as a "former thief and a rapist".

When the Committee's Chairman, Dipandra Mouelle, a Cameronian appeals judge, read into the record a section from an Amnesty report listing 41 specific cases of torture, Ambassador Wu walked out of the room, apparently to indicate his disapproval. The cases had all been published in an official Chinese paper, the Henan Legal Daily, in 1992.

The Chinese delegation said that 412 cases of torture were investigated by the authorities in 1995, 3 more than in the previous year. It would not give figures for executions in China, saying only that of 545,000 people who received criminal sentences in China in 1995, 43% were sentenced either to death or to imprisonment for over 4 years.

-----------------

Note: list of prisoners declared by the UN to be arbitarily detained is available from TIN.

Note: Correction to previous update ("Secret Film of Deforestation", 10th May): In paragraph 3 "2 or 3 metres" should be "2 or 3 feet".