Activists suffer as China holds on to labour camps (Feature)

By Bill Smith Jan 13, 2011, 8:38 GMT

Beijing - Wang Ling witnessed many abuses and suffered violence from guards and other prisoners during her 15-month imprisonment at a women's 're-education through labour' centre.

Wang, 55, was sent to the Beijing Women's Re-education Through Labour (RTL) camp a few days after she was taken into police custody in November 2007 after she had filed complaints with the government.

'I petitioned because of a [housing] demolition issue, then petitioned because I was arrested and beaten by the police,' Wang said.

Wang was not found guilty by any court because RTL sentences are 'administrative' and are normally passed by a local judicial committee without a trial.

Two recent reports by international human rights groups highlighted the controversial system.

'Re-education through labour allows the police to unilaterally impose custodial sentences of up to three years while depriving detainees of any due process of law and judicial oversight,' US-based Human Rights Watch said in a report on China this week.

'However, in 2009 and 2010, the Chinese government made no known effort, nor did it issue a deadline, to abolish legal mechanisms that enable arbitrary detention, including administrative detention such as re-education through labour and house arrest,' the report said.

In an open letter issued via the US-headquartered rights group Human Rights in China, Beijing-based lawyers Teng Biao and Lan Zhixue this week asked Dick Costolo, the chief executive of the social-networking website Twitter, to lobby China over the sentencing in November of an online activist to one year of RTL.

Authorities in the central city of Xinxiang accused Cheng Jianping of 'disturbing social order' by posting a brief Twitter message that urged people to attack Japanese property.

Cheng, who used her online name Wang Yi, was arrested after she added her three-word comment to an apparently sarcastic message from her fiance that she reposted on Twitter on October 17.

Teng and Lan said they appealed last month to the Xinxiang government to overturn Cheng's sentence but they received no response.

The city authorities' punishment of Cheng - who merely posted the seemingly flippant comment 'Angry Youth! Charge!' - was a 'crude trampling of her lawful right to free speech,' the lawyers said.

China has debated the future of RTL for more than a decade with many experts and even government officials arguing that it violates the national constitution.

The Charter 08 manifesto for democratic reform in China - which was signed by intellectuals and rights activists and helped to win one of its authors, Liu Xiaobo, last year's Nobel Peace Prize - also included a call for the abolition of RTL.

The Ministry of Public Security appears to have thwarted efforts to abolish the system, insisting that it needs the punishment to deal with minor crimes and those that are inadequately covered by legislation.

The debate intensified last year after the widely reported deaths of two prisoners at separate labour camps. Officials said one prisoner had died after a freezing winter shower and the other had starved to death.

'How come the RTL system is not dead after 'cold shower death' and 'skeleton death'?' a China Youth Daily commentary asked in May.

Yu Jianrong, a social scientist and long-term campaigner against RTL, said it has caused 'widespread dissatisfaction' among the public.

Its 'fundamental nature has not changed' since RTL was introduced in the 1950s partly as an extrajudicial 'tool of political struggle,' Yu wrote in a commentary in the Beijing News last year.

Rights groups estimated that 200,000 to 400,000 people were being held in China's more than 300 RTL centres.

Although the total number of people sentenced to RTL could have decreased in the past several years, party because people labelled drug addicts are now channeled into a separate system of compulsory rehabilitation, local police still appear to use RTL to silence housing, land rights, environmental and religious activists.

Anecdotal evidence suggested that the number of petitioners sent to RTL centres might even be growing.

'Beware of using RTL as a tool to suppress petitioners,' said a commentary in June in People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's official newspaper.

'We're all scared of being sent to RTL. I daren't go to Tiananmen Square now,' activist Nie Lina said of the Beijing square where many petitioners hope to stage protests.

At the women's RTL centre in Tiantanghe Farm in Beijing's outlying Daxing district, Wang Ling spent many of her days gluing medicine boxes and envelopes.

About two-thirds of the 400 other women held in her section of the camp were followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, she said.

'The most pitiful were the Falun Gong [members],' Wang said, alleging abuses including sleep deprivation, gagging, hooding and unannounced overnight transfers.

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