Wired: A Human Rights Site? In China?

By David Winning

Jan. 23, 2002

BEIJING -- China launched its largest website on human rights Tuesday with a zero-tolerance vow to smash Muslim separatists.

The English-language site was set up with a promise to present the nation's human rights situation "comprehensively and objectively."

But Web users expecting a self-examining review of China's record on human rights will be disappointed.

[..]

Links to Western human rights organizations such as Amnesty International … are excluded from the site.

While a speech by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson is prominently featured, scant reference is given to American-sponsored resolutions at the U.N. human rights conference rebuking China's record.

Even stories that could have been given positive spin by Beijing were omitted, such as Monday's release of Tibetan music scholar Ngawang Choephel from an 18-year jail term for spying.

Headline news instead centreed on a state council report detailing 200 "terrorist" incidents in China's troublesome Xinjiang province, which sinologists believe prefaces a full-scale crackdown under the banner of the United States' international war on terror.

"The website presents China's human rights conditions comprehensively and objectively, promotes academic exchanges in human rights and provides information for international human rights dialogue and cooperation, a spokesman for humanrights-china.org said.

The Web page is an English-language version of an Internet site established in 1998 by the China Society for Human Rights Studies.

It includes five sections on laws and regulations, history, theories, organizations and international
exchanges.

The site map features articles on the Falun Gong, the religious [group] that China has banned … since 1999 and followed up with the arrest of scores of followers amid claims of widespread abuse.

There are also paths to the prevailing Chinese government view on human rights in Tibet -- which
denounces the Dalai Lama "clique" -- as well as views from Hong Kong and Macao.

Amnesty International was not impressed. It has reported that 1,511 death sentences were passed in 2000 and at least 1,000 executions were carried out. Amnesty officials believe this represents only a fraction of the true figures, as death penalty statistics remain a state secret in China.

"Political interference is common," Amnesty International says on its website. "Often, mass executions are carried out before major events or public holidays as a warning to others. Execution is by shooting or lethal injection and sometimes takes place within hours of sentencing.

"Many cases are reported in which death sentences were passed on the basis of contentious evidence, including confessions extracted under torture."

Source:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49947,00.html