MCLC: re-education revisited

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: re-education revisited
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (1/29/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/opinion/global/re-education-revisited.htm
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Re-education Revisited
By NICHOLAS BEQUELIN

HONG KONG — How much of a reformer is China’s new leader, Xi Jinping? The
announcement in January that by year’s end China is going to stop using or
even abolish “Re-education Through Labor” — the notorious system
instituted in the mid-1950s and modeled on the Soviet gulag — could offer
an important clue.

While the government has provided no details about what it intends to do,
it is not likely that the re-education archipelago
<http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/in-the-best-case-scenario-lao
jiao-would-be-abolished-outright/> — an estimated 350 labor camps with
about 160,000 inmates — will be closed anytime soon. Presumably the camps
will continue to hold inmates sentenced for crimes like drug abuse,
prostitution and minor offenses.

But the proposed change could put an end to China’s largest system of
administrative detention, a punishment imposed solely through an
administrative decision, without any trial.

Laojiao, as the re-education system is known in Chinese, is nominally
reserved for minor crimes that do not qualify for criminal punishment.
Under Mao, most Laojiao inmates were victims of political purges. From the
1980s, they became mostly petty criminals and minor offenders, including
juveniles. But the police have also long used it as an expedient tool for
suppressing dissent and incarcerating government critics, petitioners,
whistle-blowers, rights activists, members of underground Christian
churches or banned religious sects, and others deemed a “threat” to public
order.

One such “threat” was Tang Hui, sentenced in early August 2012
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/16/china-tang-hui-labour-camp>
to 18 months of Laojiao for protesting the lenient sentences passed on the
people who had kidnapped, raped and forced into prostitution her
11-year-old daughter. Tang’s case was the biggest of several cases that
spiraled last year into a national outrage over Re-education Through Labor
thanks to the Chinese citizenry’s newfound power of microblogging
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/what-role-did-chi
nas-twitter-play-in-beijings-labor-camp-reforms/263499/>. Tang was
released on Aug. 10.

Conditions in re-education camps are dire: Physical abuse by guards and
the criminal elements they entrust to enforce “order” is common, as are
long hours of arduous work with no rest day; institutionalized corruption;
deficient health care; and what the Justice Ministry refers to as
“abnormal deaths.”

The most authoritative official statement on Re-education Through Labor’s
fate since January, by a political and legal affairs party leader, Chen
Jiping, suggests that the system will be entirely scrapped by the end of
2013. What will come after remains unclear. The government reportedly had
considered setting up a somewhat milder system of administrative
detention, but Laojiao-lite would not be much progress.

Some lawyers have pointed out that Re-education Through Labor is unlawful
under the current Constitution and China’s obligations as a party to the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
<http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cpr.html>in 1998. They have advocated instead
that the judiciary should set up special courts to handle minor offenses.

Regardless of which route is chosen, any improvements on paper might be
quickly reversed in practice if not accompanied by more comprehensive
legal reforms. After China abolished the crime of “counterrevolution”
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2008-12/06/content_7278499.htm> in
1997, in what was then hailed as a major advance, the only real change
proved to be that political offenders were sentenced under “state
security” crimes instead.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year
sentence 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/world/09nobel.html?pagewanted=all> for
“incitement to subvert state power and the socialist system,” can attest
to that. Similarly, when in 2003 the government abolished
<http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA17/028/2003/en/5e066632-d6c2-11
dd-ab95-a13b602c0642/asa170282003en.html> another kind of administrative
detention system, local authorities started confining some “troublemakers”
to illegal “black jails” and psychiatric hospitals.

Nonetheless, for Xi Jinping to make the abolition of Laojiao his first
initiative on the legal front could signal that he doesn’t intend to give
the security apparatus influence beyond its law-enforcement portfolio.

His risk-averse predecessor, Hu Jintao, allowed the security apparatus to
hijack his “harmonious society” agenda and to instead create a massive
“stability preservation” project that likely fueled as much conflict as it
crushed. Now the security apparatus has been politically downgraded and
its head removed from the Communist Party’s top echelon, the Politburo’s
Standing Committee.

Abolishing Re-education Through Labor alone would not solve the many
failings of China’s criminal justice system, nor would it mark an end to
the suppression of government critics.

Nonetheless it would be an important step forward, removing what has
remained for decades a crippling obstacle toward realizing a fundamental
requirement of any system of the rule of law: that no one accused of a
crime can be deprived of liberty without a fair trial before a court. It
would be a good start.

Nicholas Bequelin is senior researcher in the Asia division of Human
Rights Watch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/opinion/global/re-education-revisited.htm
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