Rights group: China political arrests up: 604 people out of a population of 1.3 billion.
- From: rst0wxyz <rst0wxyz@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:53:11 -0800 (PST)
Rights group: China political arrests up Tue Nov 27, 3:34 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071127/ap_on_re_as/china_political_crimes_1
BEIJING - The number of people arrested in China on charges of
endangering national security more than doubled last year, a rights
lobbying group reported Wednesday in a finding that underscores the
communist government's sustained clampdown on dissent.
The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation said a recently published
Chinese government yearbook showed that state security charges --
commonly used against political critics -- were filed against 604
people in 2006, compared with 296 the year before.
The state security arrests were the highest number since 2002, Dui Hua
added.
Only a few of the highest profile prosecutions have been publicized,
either by China's government or rights groups, while more than 90
percent of the defendants were not publicly known, Dui Hua said.
The rise in state security charges illustrates the breadth of the
government's two-year-old crackdown. The campaign seeks to silence
traditional critics as well as new dissent voices emerging from a
rapidly changing society and to ensure no disruptions during next
summer's Olympics in Beijing.
"This dramatic increase in arrests confirms the heightened crackdown
on dissent in China that we've been witnessing since at least the
middle of 2005," said John Kamm, a former businessman who founded and
runs Dui Hua.
Among the activists known to have been brought up on state security
charges are the lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who sought to defend members of
the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group, and two sons of Rebiya
Kadeer, a businesswoman now in exile who is an advocate for the rights
of her Muslim ethnic group against China's Han Chinese majority.
Also presumably among those charged were 10 Tibetans, another ethnic
group that has chafed under the communist government's rule, Dui Hua
said.
The crime of endangering state security was enacted a decade ago to
replace the more obviously political charge of "counterrevolution."
The new charge covers a wide range of crimes from espionage to
subversion to advocating separatism.
Dui Hua has compiled an extensive database on Chinese political
prisoners. Its researchers often comb through local newspapers and
obscure publications to try to identify Chinese sentenced for
political crimes, and the organization often lobbies on their behalf.
Based on the recently published 2007 China Law Yearbook, Dui Hua said,
561 of the 604 people charged with endangering state security last
year were prosecuted. That was up from 349 in 2005, it said.
.
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