A US lawmaker said on Tuesday he would ask China to let him visit blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠) to assess his condition after accounts that he was severely beaten at his home.
Chinese activists organized through the Internet have been flocking to Chen’s village in a bid to win his release from house arrest, but campaigners say that thugs have beaten up all who have come close.
A US commission that monitors human rights in China called a hearing to air concerns about Chen, who enraged authorities by documenting late-term abortions and forced sterilizations under Beijing’s one-child policy.
“Enough is enough. The cruelty and extreme violence against Chen and his family brings dishonor to the government of China and must end,” said US Representative Chris Smith, chairman of the Congressional Executive Commission on China.
Smith said he would shortly ask China to allow a US congressional delegation to travel to Chen’s village of Dongshigu in China’s eastern Shandong Province.
“I am trying to put together a trip to go there and go to his house. We’re already checking flights,” Smith said after the hearing, saying that the lawmakers “desperately hope” that Chen is still alive.
Even if China does not allow the trip, Smith said that US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or US Ambassador to China Gary Locke (駱家輝) should raise the case at the highest levels.
Chen, who will turn 40 later this month, is a self-taught lawyer who has been blind since childhood.
He was released last year after four years in prison. He later made a daring video, smuggled to the US-based group ChinaAid, in which he said police threatened to beat him or throw him back in jail if he spoke out.
Foreign journalists who have tried to visit Chen at his home have been roughed up or harassed and barred from gaining access to the village.
Testifying before the commission, Sharon Hom (譚競嫦), the executive director of New York-based Human Rights in China, said her group spoke with a villager who reported hearing beatings from inside Chen’s house.
“No one has confirmed what’s actually happening inside, but the reports that are out should really raise very serious concerns,” Hom said.
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