A court in southwestern China has rejected a lawsuit filed by a group of parents seeking compensation for the deaths of their children when their classrooms crumbled during a devastating earthquake in May, one of the parents said yesterday.
The court’s move is a sign of the authorities’ extreme sensitivity to any protests by parents demanding investigations into alleged corruption and shoddy construction, a flash point for government critics after the 7.9-magnitude quake killed nearly 70,000 people in Sichuan Province, including many students.
The group of about 60 parents filed the lawsuit against school and local authorities in Sichuan on Dec. 1 at the Deyang People’s Intermediate Court, said a parent who would only give his surname, Sang, because he was afraid of official retaliation.
The parents want an official apology and compensation for the deaths of their children after Fuxin No. 2 Primary School in Mianzhu city collapsed during the May 12 quake.
The government still has not given a separate toll for children who were crushed when their shoddily built schools collapsed, but has said that about 7,000 classrooms were destroyed. Their deaths have become a sensitive political issue, with parents — many of whom lost their only child — staging protests demanding investigations.
Many of the parents say they have also been subjected to intimidation and financial inducements to silence them.
Sang, one of the parents’ representatives, said a judge from the court last week informed the plaintiffs verbally that it would not accept their case and that the central government had issued an internal memo to the courts to say that such cases were not to be heard.
Sang also said police on Sunday detained one of the other parents for a day and warned him against talking to overseas media, saying those who did could face treason charges.
“We representatives are now moving constantly to hide away from the police,” Sang said. “We have to live in our relatives’ homes.”
At the People’s Intermediate Court in Deyang, a woman surnamed Dai confirmed that a lawsuit had been filed against the town of Fuxin, the education department of Mianzhu, the school’s principal and the company that built the school. She referred further questions to a case-filing department that refused to take calls from the media.
Sang said the group continued to grow by the day, with about 80 parents currently planning to petition the Deyang City Government now that the court has rejected the case.
“We are reluctant to set a time for the petition now as there are too many of us. Once they find out about our plan, we won’t be able to carry it out,” Sang said.
In September, a Chinese government scientist acknowledged that a rush to build schools in recent years likely led to construction flaws causing so many of them to collapse — the first official admission that low construction standards may have been behind the student deaths.
In many cases, schoolhouses were the only buildings in the area to fully collapse and experts say China’s problem, similar to that in many other parts of the world, was a lack of commitment by governments to safe schools.
While the government has vowed strict punishment for bad construction along with the investigation, there has so far been no public attempt to hold anyone accountable.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
RSS