China is hosting a three day forum of international lawyers. One of the panels included in the forum is one on human rights. There's either a lot of irony for holding such a panel or it's an oxymoron given China's appalling human rights record. In Western China the government is currently holding up 1 million Uighur's on the pretense of preventing terrorism by the Muslim minority in the area. In fact these reeducation centers are internment camps at best and prisons at worst.
In China the rule of law is nonexistent as all so called trials have predetermined outcomes and the accused are forced to confess to their crimes on live television.
But as the forum got under way, at least one spouse of a detained lawyer was put under house arrest. Several rights groups have issued open letters decrying the event as a “cynical charade” intended to gloss over China’s ongoing crackdown on lawyers, from well-known human rights advocates to self-taught local, or “barefoot, lawyers” who help residents petition for their rights.
“To this day, there are still human rights lawyers who are forcefully ‘disappeared’,” the China human rights lawyer concern group wrote in an open letter on Friday.
China’s justice minister, Fu Zhenghua, said it was “an opportunity for China to draw on global experience in developing the rule of law”, Xinhua news agency reported.
In China the rule of law is nonexistent as all so called trials have predetermined outcomes and the accused are forced to confess to their crimes on live television.
But as the forum got under way, at least one spouse of a detained lawyer was put under house arrest. Several rights groups have issued open letters decrying the event as a “cynical charade” intended to gloss over China’s ongoing crackdown on lawyers, from well-known human rights advocates to self-taught local, or “barefoot, lawyers” who help residents petition for their rights.
“To this day, there are still human rights lawyers who are forcefully ‘disappeared’,” the China human rights lawyer concern group wrote in an open letter on Friday.
“Most endured torture during incarceration; some still suffer from psychological trauma because of the untold horrors they experienced while detained or jailed,” such as sleep deprivation, forced medication, and being forced to sit in a contraption known as the “tiger bench”.
Among those detained are four lawyers who have been declared “arbitrarily detained” by the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention, including Wang Quanzhang, who was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for subversion after a secret trial held on Boxing Day last year.
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