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.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US