By David Volodzko
Reports from human rights groups paint a dark picture of the use of torture in China’s legal system.
Amnesty International just released its November 11 report, “No End In Sight: Torture and Forced Confessions in China,” detailing the prevalence of torture in China.
Upon hearing this, Chinese Community Party fundamentalists will no doubt pitch their best tu quoque curveball, and yes, to an extent it’s unfair to single out China, since it isn’t the only nation that practices torture.
On prominent cases is the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. However, when the Pentagon refused to release the names of prisoners held there, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, something unimaginable in China’s political climate, and a federal judge ordered the Pentagon to comply.
On a much smaller scale, there are cases like that of the commissariat of Saint Denis, just north of Paris, who in 2005 faced allegations that he’d ordered police to rape and torture prisoners. But he was forced to resign, whereas “No End In Sight” notes that in China, “there is little legislation criminalizing torture as such, and anti-torture legislation is mostly confined to the prohibition of obtaining ‘confessions’ or other purported evidence through torture.”
Amnesty International has also published reports on Israel’s torture practices, but Israel has human rights groups such as B’Tselem fighting for the rights of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, whereas the recent report states that in China, “the most active human rights lawyers have increasingly become targets of government crackdowns, and face disbarment and harassment at the hands of authorities” and “have themselves become victims of torture.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat