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发帖数: 110 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/asia/03china.html?_r=1&
BEIJING — Last Jan. 27, an Inner Mongolian rights activist, Govruud
Huuchinhuu, suddenly vanished after leaving a hospital where she had
undergone treatment for cancer. On Feb. 16, the Beijing human-rights lawyer
Tang Jitian vanished after being forcibly taken away by police officers. On
May 30, an ethnic Uighur, Ershidin Israel, vanished after being deported to
China from Kazakhstan as a terrorism suspect. In the next two weeks, three
other Uighurs vanished as well.
The Beijing artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who vanished into police custody
on April 3 and did not emerge until June 22, is but the most famous Chinese
activist to suffer an “enforced disappearance,” as human rights officials
call such episodes. Experts say 2011 has seen a sharp and worrisome
increase inside China of a security tactic that a United Nations
international convention has sought to outlaw.
Now China is answering complaints by rights activists that the
disappearances of those and other Chinese are unlawful and potentially
inhumane: It is rewriting the national criminal procedure code to make them
legal.
The new proposal, drafted by a committee of the National People’s Congress,
the nation’s quasi-legislature, is undergoing public review. It would
amend the current code, which allows government authorities to place
criminal suspects under house arrest for up to six months. The proposed
revision would allow them to imprison in a secret location anyone who, under
home surveillance, is found to hinder an investigation. Suspects’ families
would have to be told of their disappearance within 24 hours — unless
doing so would hinder the investigation of crimes involving national
security or terrorism.
Critics described the proposed revision as one of the most explicit backward
steps in legal protections for people who offend the Chinese authorities
since the country began moving toward the semblance of a Western-style legal
system three decades ago. It would give security officials wide leeway to
“disappear” dissidents and other activists without telling anyone — in
other words, it would legalize Chinese officials’ current practices.
The proposal is part of a larger revision of the criminal procedural code
that has in other respects won praise from some legal experts, because it
would give many ordinary criminal suspects new legal protections and rein in
the ability of the authorities to commit abuses.
For example, the proposed text, which has just been published, appears to
bar the use of evidence obtained by torture. It would give most criminal
suspects an unqualified right to see a lawyer, and would extend requirements
that witnesses actually appear at trials to give testimony.
While these are basic tenets of criminal procedure elsewhere, they are
potentially groundbreaking advances in China, where the court system is not
an independent branch of government, but rather answers to the Communist
Party, whose overriding concern is maintaining state power.
It remains to be seen whether the revisions, if they are enacted, will be
implemented as written. Some analysts have expressed skepticism that a ban
on evidence obtained by torture could be effective, for example, because
lawyers do not yet have the right to be present at interrogations, when most
torture occurs.
“The balance between using the law to protect society and using the law to
protect individual rights is still heavily weighted on the side of
protecting society,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, an independent human rights
analyst based in Hong Kong and a leading expert on China’s criminal
procedure. “And, one could more cynically say, on the side of protecting
the party.”
If the past is any indication, the proposed revisions concerning forced
disappearances are likely to affect a relatively small number of people,
mostly dissidents and other thorns in the state’s side. But their narrow
impact does not reduce their significance, Mr. Rosenzweig argued.
Enforced disappearances are widely regarded as human-rights abuses because
they deny suspects legal protections, needlessly subject relatives of the
disappeared to mental strain and generally increase the chances that
unsupervised officials who hold captives in undisclosed locations will
engage in torture. Liu Xiaoyuan, a prominent defense lawyer known for his
involvement in controversial cases, called the proposed revision “just
scary.”
“It literally gives the police a ticket to free themselves from any form of
supervision,” he said. “The criminal law should protect citizens’ rights
and restrict the power of the authorities. The new revision does exactly
the opposite.”
Caixin, an intrepid investigative business magazine, called the provision a
“grab-bag justification that would lead to investigative organs being able
to decide as they please whether or not to inform family members, and to
secret detentions running rampant.”
The proposal has not been approved, and could still change, although most
experts consider that highly unlikely. Already, it has been the object of
vigorous public criticism on some of the nation’s major microblogs; one
post charged that it had “pushed the Chinese people’s sense of insecurity
to a new height.” Another post said, “The new criminal law should be
called ‘special people-controlling regulations for chaotic times.’ ”
Some analysts said they saw progress of a sort in the criticism. “Chinese
citizens today no longer take it as a matter of course that the government
has a God-given right to draw up any law it pleases,” said Nicholas
Bequelin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is based in Hong Kong.
In June, a United Nations working group on enforced disappearances expressed
growing concern about the rise in such cases inside China, calling them “
the continuation of a disturbing trend in the suppression of dissidents.”
“There can never be an excuse to disappear people, especially when those
persons are peacefully expressing their dissent with the government of their
country,” the group said in a written statement.
Two United Nations conventions, one enacted in 1976 and the other last
December, commit member nations to refrain from making their citizens
disappear in this way and to protect their legal rights. China has pledged
to ratify both conventions, but has yet to do so. Nor has the United States
ratified the 2010 convention, which explicitly prohibits enforced
disappearances.
Like Mr. Ai, many of China’s disappeared eventually resurface, some showing
signs of having undergone arduous treatment while in captivity. Others have
vanished without explanation for extended periods, including the Nobel
Prize winning writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo, who vanished for six months
in 2008 and 2009.
And some do not return at all, like the prominent human-rights lawyer Gao
Zhisheng, who has not been heard from since he disappeared in April 2010. A
handful have been missing for far longer. | m********c
发帖数: 13337 | 2 您最近的房屋agent生意做得不错啊。
【在 s**********e 的大作中提到】
: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/asia/03china.html?_r=1&
: BEIJING — Last Jan. 27, an Inner Mongolian rights activist, Govruud
: Huuchinhuu, suddenly vanished after leaving a hospital where she had
: undergone treatment for cancer. On Feb. 16, the Beijing human-rights lawyer
: Tang Jitian vanished after being forcibly taken away by police officers. On
: May 30, an ethnic Uighur, Ershidin Israel, vanished after being deported to
: China from Kazakhstan as a terrorism suspect. In the next two weeks, three
: other Uighurs vanished as well.
: The Beijing artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who vanished into police custody
: on April 3 and did not emerge until June 22, is but the most famous Chinese
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