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Beijing to probe labor abuse claim on Olympic goods

Beijing Olympics officials vowed yesterday to come down hard on any cases of children being used to produce merchandise for the Games, after a report accused factories of "gross exploitation."

The report by the Playfair Alliance, released in London, said Chinese children as young as 12 were involved in making licensed bags, caps and stationery for next year's Games.

Vice Chairman of the Beijing Games organizing committee (BOCOG) Jiang Xiaoyu (蔣效愚) said he took such issues seriously and sought "to protect the reputation of the Olympic movement and the Beijing Olympic Games."

"The Olympic organizing committee is now in the process of verifying this, and if what was in the relevant reports indeed exists the organizing committee will deal with it seriously," Jiang said in Hong Kong, where he was meeting local Olympic officials.

The Playfair Alliance, which is represented in Britain by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and Labour Behind the Label, researched working conditions at four factories in southern China making 2008 Olympic bags, headgear and other products.

Researchers found some of the workers earned half the legal minimum wage and were made to work up to 15 hours per day, seven days a week.

The report said one of the four factories had employed "more than 20" children under 16 because they were cheaper than adults. They were hired during the school winter break, it said, and some of the childrens' mothers had brought them in to earn school fees. The children were usually required to work at a large table stacking notebooks, it said, adding they worked long hours.

In other news from Beijing, the wife of a dissident was barred from leaving the country yesterday to attend a human-rights meeting in Switzerland, one day after another activist was stopped from going to the same meeting.

Zeng Jinyan (曾金燕), an AIDS and human-rights campaigner, was recently named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people. Both she and her husband, Hu Jia (胡佳), were stopped by security agents from leaving China last month. Hu has been largely confined to his home ever since.

Hu said Zeng, who is four months pregnant, was briefly detained at the airport and officials had confiscated her passport.

"The reason was that the State Council, the State Security Ministry and the Ministry of Public Security, the three organs issued this order that Jinyan was endangering national security," Hu said in a text message.

China was particularly sensitive to exposures of human-rights violations in the run-up to next year's Olympics, and averse to screenings of their short film, which shows the couple under surveillance by police, he said.
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