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Black jails in China
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Petitioners behind locked gates of a black jail in Beijing , a 2007 photo.
In what is a first for China, a report with official imprimatur admits to the existence of secret detention centres across the country. Capital Beijing itself has a network of 73 such black jails, the report in Liaowang (Outlook) magazine says.
Officials in provinces don’t want any complaint to reach the Big Bosses in Beijing. Because, their performance rating is bench marked to complaints. So what they do is to prevent people with complaints from reaching Beijing and in case they are outsmarted, then to pack them off to these private detention centres ‘where they are often subjected to ‘intimidation, torture and sexual abuse’.
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) had put spot light on these black jails recently and immediately faced a severe dress down with the Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang angrily declaring that ‘there are no black jails in China’.
The Liaowang disclosure, therefore, signals a possible willingness by the Communist Party of China to confront a problem which has become public knowledge world wide.
‘This is the first time an official, high-level magazine acknowledges that they (black jails) exist. This is fairly significant’, says Wang Songlian at Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Liaowang report speaks of a ‘a monstruous business network’ in Beijing to ‘feed, house, transport, and manhunt, detain and retrieve petitioners’.
It puts the number of people engaged to abduct ‘troublesome’ citizens at over 10,000 –some of them private security guards deployed solely for the purpose of accosting hundreds of petitioners pouring into the capital daily from all over the country.
A 46-year-old victim from Jiangsu province told the Human Rights Watch (HRW) that he was treated inhumanly for over a month in a black jail. ‘They are inhuman...two people dragged me by the hair and put me into the car. My two hands were tied up and I couldn't move. Then [after arriving back in Jiangsu] they put me inside a room where there were two women who stripped me of my clothes [and] beat my head [and] used their feet to stomp my body’.
"The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government's rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law," says Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. "The government should move swiftly to close these facilities, investigate those running them, and provide assistance to those abused in them."
Officials in provinces don’t want any complaint to reach the Big Bosses in Beijing. Because, their performance rating is bench marked to complaints. So what they do is to prevent people with complaints from reaching Beijing and in case they are outsmarted, then to pack them off to these private detention centres ‘where they are often subjected to ‘intimidation, torture and sexual abuse’.
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) had put spot light on these black jails recently and immediately faced a severe dress down with the Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang angrily declaring that ‘there are no black jails in China’.
The Liaowang disclosure, therefore, signals a possible willingness by the Communist Party of China to confront a problem which has become public knowledge world wide.
‘This is the first time an official, high-level magazine acknowledges that they (black jails) exist. This is fairly significant’, says Wang Songlian at Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
Liaowang report speaks of a ‘a monstruous business network’ in Beijing to ‘feed, house, transport, and manhunt, detain and retrieve petitioners’.
It puts the number of people engaged to abduct ‘troublesome’ citizens at over 10,000 –some of them private security guards deployed solely for the purpose of accosting hundreds of petitioners pouring into the capital daily from all over the country.
A 46-year-old victim from Jiangsu province told the Human Rights Watch (HRW) that he was treated inhumanly for over a month in a black jail. ‘They are inhuman...two people dragged me by the hair and put me into the car. My two hands were tied up and I couldn't move. Then [after arriving back in Jiangsu] they put me inside a room where there were two women who stripped me of my clothes [and] beat my head [and] used their feet to stomp my body’.
"The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government's rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law," says Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. "The government should move swiftly to close these facilities, investigate those running them, and provide assistance to those abused in them."
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