AFP: World psychiatrists consider call to inspect Chinese hospitals

YOKOHAMA, Japan, Aug 26 (AFP) - A resolution calling for China to open its psychiatric hospitals to independent inspection, amid evidence of abuses against dissidents, was to be submitted Monday to the general assembly of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA).

The resolution calls for the WPA to arrange an investigative mission to China to probe evidence political dissidents are routinely detained in psychiatric institutions and forcibly treated or even tortured.

The president of Britain' s Royal College of Psychiatrists, Mike Shooter, was due to table the resolution during the WPA assembly which was meeting in closed session on the third day of the World Congress of Psychiatry in this port city southwest of Tokyo.

The British body unanimously approved a similar resolution at its annual general meeting in July 2001.

The WPA assembly was expected to run until around 1:00 am or 2:00 am Tuesday (1600 GMT or 1700 GMT Monday), and the outcome of the vote on whether to adopt the resolution would only be announced after the meeting ended, said WPA secretary general Juan Mezzich.

The move follows the publication earlier this month of a 300-page report detailing evidence of abuse by New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch and the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP), a foundation combatting the political abuse of psychiatry.

The report said China incarcerated thousands of political dissidents in mental hospitals on a scale reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. It also said the practice was on the rise.

Those targeted included members of the banned Falungong spiritual movement, independent labour organisers and individuals who complain about official persecution, the report said.

The principal author of the report, human rights researcher Robin Munro, said he was cautiously optimistic the resolution would be adopted, but he expressed concern that delegates were not aware the issue was being raised.

"The WPA has not circulated the text of the China resolution ahead of the meeting even though it' s the most important ethical question facing world psychiatry at the congress," he said.

"It is absolutely necessary and appropriate that the WPA send this mission now ... because the WPA in a series of declarations ...going back to 1977 ... repeatedly spells out that any politically-based diagnosis of psychiatric illness is unnacceptable," Munro said.

Galli Viviana, a child psychiatrist from Ohio and Falungong practitioner, said during a congress symposium Monday that more than 1,000 Falungong members had been forced into Chinese mental hospitals, along with Roman Catholics, Protestants and Buddhists.

Her presentation cited examples of torture including forced medication and being tied up for days on end and submerged in water.

"There is sufficient independent evidence (of abuse for the WPA to act), particularly of non-Falungong protesters -- trade unionists, people who have complained about corruption," said Jim Birley, a GIP board member and former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists who led a WPA inspection team to the former Soviet Union in 1991.

"In the last few years, constantly around 3,000 people have been held in hospitals as political cases at any one time," he said.

Birley said even if the WPA adopted the resolution, the Chinese authorities would still have to agree to allow investigators to visit.

"The key is whether the Chinese government thinks the WPA is an important enough body to feel enough pressure to act," he said.