It took 10 years of effort by the UN to convince China to allow the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to visit the country for the first time for inspections.
Under international guidelines, such inspections include unannounced visits to prisons and unsupervised interviews with prisoners.
Beijing's move to allow the inspections came just ahead of President Hu Jintao's (
Manfred Nowak, the current rapporteur and Vienna-based Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights, is due to visit China from November 21 to December 2.
Apart from talks in Beijing, he is expected to travel to the Tibetan capital Lhasa to collect information about the condition of prisoners in Tibet, where many oppose the rule of China over the predominantly Buddhist Himalayan region.
Nowak also plans to visit the autonomous Xinjiang in Northwest China where the Uighur -- an Islamic Turk ethnic minority -- have reported persecution by the central Chinese government.
Whether Nowak will be able to establish the truth about the occurrence of torture in China is unclear as the UN official has to investigate numerous torture allegations during his short time in the country.
The Falun Gong, a spiritual movement with millions of followers, says its members are systematically tortured and many of them killed in re-education camps.
The group is outlawed and persecuted across the country amid Beijing's efforts to stem the rise of the Buddhist and Taoist inspired movement, that reminds communist leaders of former secret societies.
Human rights activists have also reported frequent attacks on political prisoners by other detainees, who have been instigated by prison guards.
Even regular suspects are often tortured by police officials in an attempt to force confessions, according to observers.
The case of She Xianglin (
She Xianglin, now aged 40, said he had been forced under torture to confess the murder.
When some public debate was admitted because of the outcry in the country after the revelations, even Chinese experts said forced confessions were "not unusual in China."
"Although strictly forbidden by law, they are common in many places because the police are under great pressure from above to solve crimes," a law professor was quoted by China's official news agency Xinhua in a rare case of media openness.
Besides the practise of forced confessions, detainees in China are facing an underdeveloped legal systems in which defense lawyers have little status or impact.
In view of such circumstances, the high number of death sentences carried out in China every year appears even more alarming.
More people are executed per year in the PRC than in the entire rest of the world. The precise figure is a state secret.
Even Beijing has admitted the risk of miscarriages of justice. However, even though the Supreme Court wants to review all death penalties issued by provincial courts as a matter of routine, it has only checked individual cases because of lack of staff.
When the United Nation's new Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbor makes her entry visit to the Chinese government next week, she plans to discuss the question of death penalties.
Other issues on her list are said to be the administrative detention in "reeducation camps" without court trials as well as the persecution of minorities.
Arbor's visit will not be the first one by a UN Human Rights Commissioner. Her predecessor Mary Robinson, who held the post between 1997 and 2002, had been in China several times.
But given the sensitive nature of the visit and the timing shortly before president Hu's visit, China's public media have not yet been allowed to report the planned arrivals of both Arbor and Nowak.
Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption,
On Monday, a group of bipartisan US senators arrived in Taiwan to support the nation’s special defense bill to counter Chinese threats. At the same time, Beijing announced that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had invited Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) to visit China, a move to make the KMT a pawn in its proxy warfare against Taiwan and the US. Since her inauguration as KMT chair last year, Cheng, widely seen as a pro-China figure, has made no secret of her desire to interact with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and meet with Xi, naming it a
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) took the stage at a protest rally on Sunday in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taipei in support of former TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who has been sentenced to 17 years in jail for corruption and embezzlement. Huang told the crowd that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) had sent a message of support the previous day, saying she would be traveling from the south to Taipei: If the protest continued into the evening, she had said, she would show up. The rally was due to end
A delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials led by Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is to travel to China tomorrow for a six-day visit to Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing, which might end with a meeting between Cheng and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). The trip was announced by Xinhua news agency on Monday last week, which cited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Song Tao (宋濤) as saying that Cheng has repeatedly expressed willingness to visit China, and that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and Xi have extended an invitation. Although some people have been speculating about a potential Xi-Cheng
RSS