Chinese police officers carry out “appalling” torture of criminal suspects, campaigners said yesterday, as they released a report that they say details Beijing’s failure to combat abusive interrogations.
Despite China claiming to have confronted alleged forced confessions through a series of reforms, Chinese prosecutors and judges “ignore clear evidence of mistreatment” while the police are covering up abuse, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report said.
The New York-based campaign group said Chinese police officers manipulate video interrogations so that confessions are made on-camera, while torture — using methods that leave no visible injuries — takes place out of sight.
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The use of ruthless “cell bosses” — fellow detainees who oversee detention centers for police departments — is also widespread, the report said.
Suspects are sometimes strapped into metal “tiger chairs” for days, deprived of sleep and food as their legs and buttocks become swollen, according to the report, titled Tiger Chairs and Cell Bosses: Police Torture of Criminal Suspects in China.
“We heard appalling stories of detainees being hung by the wrists, shackled for years and terrorized by cell bosses, yet having no real means to hold their tormentors to account,” HRW China Director Sophie Richardson said in the report.
“Police continue to be expected to produce confessions in order to secure a conviction,” Richardson told reporters in a news conference in Hong Kong yesterday.
“The expectation of a conviction is one of the main drivers of this kind of abuse,” she said.
The group analyzed hundreds of newly published court verdicts and interviewed 48 recent detainees, as well as family members, lawyers and former Chinese officials.
Of the 432 verdicts that made reference to torture allegations, just 23 resulted in a court throwing out evidence, and there were no acquittals, the report said.
HRW found only one torture prosecution — concerning three police officers — but none served prison time. It also found evidence that health workers and lawyers were unwilling to assist torture victims with their complaints.
After a series of high-profile police brutality cases in 2009 and 2010, the Chinese government vowed to crack down on abuses and revised its criminal procedure law.
The new measures were intended to strengthen detainees’ rights to access lawyers, and to ban confessions and written statements obtained through torture.
The Chinese Communist Party claims to have made the “rule of law with Chinese characteristics” one of its top priorities.
However, the massive challenge that authorities face tackling abuse was highlighted in December last year when state media admitted that forced confessions were “not rare” in China.
A total of 99.93 percent of criminal defendants in China are found guilty, official figures show.
The HRW report calls on China to transfer the management of detention centers from police departments to the Chinese Ministry of Justice, and to free the judiciary from political control.
“It is not even close to being a fair fight. The police hold so much power — not just relative to the suspects, but relative to the courts — that the defense is so weak from the very beginning of any given case,” Richardson said, adding that defendants have very limited access to lawyers or their families.
“Unless the police have their powers dramatically circumscribed in a number of different ways, we are not going to see real change,” she said.
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