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.
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
Most schoolchildren learn that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km. They do not learn that the global economy depends on just 160 of those kilometers. Blocking two narrow waterways — the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait — could send the economy back in time, if not to the Stone Age that US President Donald Trump has been threatening to bomb Iran back to, then at least to the mid-20th century, before the Rolling Stones first hit the airwaves. Over the past month and a half, Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz, which is about 39km wide at
There is a peculiar kind of political theater unfolding in East Asia — one that would be laughable if its consequences were not so dangerous. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) on April 12 returned from Beijing, where she met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and spoke earnestly about preserving “peace” and maintaining the “status quo.” It is a position that sounds responsible, even prudent. It is also a fiction. Taiwan is, by any honest definition, an independent country. It governs itself, defends itself, elects its leaders, and functions as a free and sovereign democracy. Independence is not a
RSS