MCLC: China will overhaul laogai system

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China will overhaul laogai system
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (1/7/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/world/asia/china-says-it-will-overhaul-re
-education-system.html

China Says It Will Overhaul Sprawling System of Re-education Through Labor
By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — China will start overhauling its draconian system of
re-education through labor in the coming year, according to the state news
media, signaling the incoming leadership’s determination to alter one of
the government’s more widely despised cudgels for punishing petty
criminals, religious dissidents, petitioners and other perceived social
irritants.

The brief announcement
<http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-01/07/content_27613245.htm> on Monday,
by the official Xinhua news agency, lacked details, but legal advocates
said they were hopeful that the five-decade-old system for locking up
offenders without trial would be significantly modified, if not abolished
altogether.

“If true, this would be an important advance,” said Zhang Qianfan, a law
professor at Peking University who has long pushed for the system’s
demise. “It’s a tool that is widely abused.”

Established by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to swiftly neutralize political
opponents, re-education through labor has evolved into a sprawling
extralegal system of 350 camps where more than 100,000 people toil in
prison factories and on farms for up to four years. Sentences are meted
out by local public security officials, and defendants have no access to
lawyers and little chance for appeal.

Since the 1980s, legal scholars and human rights advocates have been
urging an end to the system and urging that the prosecution of minor
offenses be shifted to criminal courts. The campaign has been re-energized
in recent months by several cases, widely promoted in the news media, in
which people were consigned to the camps for criticizing or simply
annoying local party officials.

Among the more notable cases was that of Ren Jianyu
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/world/asia/opposition-to-labor-camps-wid
ens-in-china.html>, a college graduate turned village official in
southwestern China who was sent to a work camp for “subversion” after
investigators found in his closet a T-shirt that declared “Freedom or
death.” In November, local officials, apparently cowed by a welter of
condemnation in newspapers and on the Internet, cut short his two-year
sentence.

A similar backlash also persuaded officials in Hunan Province last summer
to free a woman, Tang Hui, who was given an 18-month sentence
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/09/woman-sent-to-labor-camp-
in-china-s-latest-abuse-outrage.html> after she repeatedly protested that
the seven men who had raped and forced her 11-year-old daughter into
prostitution had been treated too leniently.

But any jubilation that the system might be on its way out was tempered by
the manner in which the news emerged. Details of a conference held by top
judicial and legal officials were reported online on Monday by a number of
news media outlets — including word that the party would “stop using the
system” within a year. Those accounts, however, were later deleted,
leaving only the brief Xinhua account.

Chen Dongsheng 
<http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_CHINA_LABOR_CAMPS?SITE=NYMID&SEC
TION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT>, a bureau chief for the official Legal Daily
who listened to a closed-circuit telecast of the meeting, told The
Associated Press that Meng Jianzhu, chief of the Communist Party’s
politics and law committee, had pledged to end the system, saying it had
“played a useful role in the past, but conditions had now changed.”
But Mr. Chen’s microblog postings on the subject promptly disappeared, and
he could not be reached for comment.

In its own report, Xinhua used the word “reform,” suggesting the changes
to the system labor might be less than sweeping. Such changes could
involve giving the system the legislative authority it currently lacks and
subjecting decisions to some level of judicial review, although China’s
party-controlled courts rarely rule in favor of defendants.

In a separate account of the same meeting, Xinhua included comments by Mr.
Meng and Xi Jinping, the incoming president, but left out any mention of
re-education through labor. Mr. Xi, who has promised to strengthen the
nation’s legal system since his elevation to party secretary in November,
reiterated his support for greater rule of law, saying the government
should “improve empathy and public credibility of legal affairs work,
striving to ensure that the public feels that justice is served in every
law case.”

Rights advocates are pleased that the issue is on the leadership’s agenda
but said that the devil would be in the details. Previous proposals for
change, they noted, have included an 18-month cap on sentences, weekend
furloughs for prisoners and access to lawyers for defendants. But such
modifications alone, they said, would leave intact the bones of a system
that violates international legal conventions as well as Chinese law.

“The risk is we’ll get re-education lite — a system that perpetuates the
ability of police to deprive people of liberty for significant periods of
time without trial or judicial oversight,” said Nicholas Bequelin
<https://twitter.com/Bequelin>, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“My fear is that such a system would end up being harder to do away with.”

Patrick Zuo contributed research.