Chinese authorities have harassed and sometimes detained survivors of last year’s Sichuan earthquake, “creating more misery” for them, Amnesty International said yesterday.
The London-based group said it found evidence of a systematic denial of judicial rights to many survivors, especially bereaved parents who were seeking official answers about how their children died in collapsed school buildings last May.
Authorities in Sichuan Province also harassed activists and lawyers who tried to help the earthquake survivors, the group said in a report called Justice Denied.
“By unlawfully locking up parents of children who died, the government is creating more misery for people who have said in some cases they lost everything in the Sichuan earthquake,” Roseann Rife, Amnesty’s Asia-Pacific deputy program director, said in a statement.
“The human toll of the Sichuan earthquake was incalculable, but authorities need to do everything in their power to protect the rights of the survivors and stop the unlawful detentions as well as allow lawyers and civil society to pursue their important functions of accountability,” Rife said.
Local authorities detained some parents and relatives for up to 21 days for demanding answers from officials about why their children died, the report said.
Some activists who tried to help the parents are “facing politically motivated trials for vaguely defined state security and public order maintenance crimes,” it said.
The May 12 earthquake killed at least 80,000 people in Sichuan and neighboring areas.
The government has not released a total for the number of children who died, but the earthquake struck during school hours and destroyed many school buildings that allegedly were poorly constructed.
Amnesty earlier reported the arrest of activist Tan Zuoren (譚作人) on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” after he compiled documents that included a list of children who died in the earthquake and an independent report on the collapse of the school buildings.
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