China's worst prisons are those in minority areas, such as Xinjiang, Tibet or Inner Mongolia, and the worst-treated prisoners are minorities, as well as Falun Gong believers, rights groups say.
Uighur "separatists" -- those accused of fighting for an independent Muslim state in northwest China's Xinjiang region -- are severely abused.
"They are treated worse because they are seen as enemies of the state, separatists or backward," says Nicolas Becquelin, research director for Human Rights in China.
PHOTO: AFP
Uighurs have told of guards pouring hot pepper oil on their open wounds after being beaten, says Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the World Uighur Congress.
"They poked a wire through his penis," Raxit says, citing the case of a Uighur wrongly accused of separatism who fled to Turkey recently after release from 18 months' imprisonment.
While the government doesn't necessarily order violence be used in most prisons, it encourages it in the case of Uighurs and believers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual group, activists say.
"In Xinjiang, the torture situation is particularly acute because there the Chinese government view [is] they do have a challenge, even more than Tibet," Becquelin says.
"Most of the guards are Han Chinese and these people are instructed all the time that we face a very serious challenge, that these people endanger national security. It's dehumanizing them as religious fanatics. All this encourages systematic violence," Becquelin says.
Since China banned Falun Gong in 1999, considering it the biggest threat to stability since the 1989 pro-democracy protests, many adherents have undergone torture in custody, the group claims.
While rights group believe Falun Gong sometimes exaggerate their claims, they and independent investigators agree violence is frequently used to force members to denounce their faith.
A Beijing lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, who recently carried out an investigation after his law firm received numerous reports of abuse, found ongoing "barbaric" persecution.
"They once kept me awake for 26 days. Whenever my eyelids closed for a second, they would beat me awake. I fainted several times," Gao quotes a retired school teacher "Liu Li" as saying.
Others went on hunger strike and were force fed until they coughed up blood.
A man named Wang Dejiang told Gao that police tied him to a wall heater with his toes barely touching the floor and left him there for hours, causing his legs to turn black.
"I can't describe the pain. I thought about committing suicide by biting my tongue, but they bound my mouth with more electrical wires until I couldn't move my mouth. I lost consciousness," Wang told him.
"To this day he can't walk properly," Gao says.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS