Human Rights Watch report, An Alleyway In Hell: Chinese petitioners end up in 'black jails'

Thousands of Chinese are abducted and detained in illegal ''black jails'' each year for trying to lodge complaints against officials, a human rights report says.

The complainants, known as petitioners, are typically detained while trying to submit their grievances to government offices that are legally established to hear their complaints, says the Human Rights Watch report An Alleyway In Hell.

Conditions in the jails are ''invariably harsh'', with detainees subjected to food and sleep deprivation, appalling sanitary conditions, beatings and worse.

''They threatened that if I escaped, they'd take me to the male prison and let [the inmates] take turns raping [me],'' said a woman, 42, in Sichuan province, who was one of 38 illegally detained petitioners interviewed by Human Rights Watch.

Officials at various tiers of government have created this network of extra-judicial abductions and detentions as a way to improve their work performance appraisals, as merit points are deducted when complaints are made against them.

Huge numbers of uniformed and plain-clothed police, and their hired thugs, are sent out to intercept petitioners before they reach the Government's petitions office.

The grim abduction and detention system was outsourced to private operators and driven underground in 2003, when Beijing ruled that local governments could no longer maintain such facilities. Security forces at all tiers of government are complicit in the system, refusing to help victims and frequently assisting their captors, says the report, published today.

It says a series of recent central government regulations and edicts that require local officials to resolve problems locally are likely to make the problems worse. ''Chinese legal scholars and academics who have researched black jails say their emergence since 2003 constitutes one of the most serious and widespread uses of extra-legal detention in China's recent history,'' the report says.

''A Chinese legal expert who has extensively researched the issue … estimates that the number of incidents in which citizens are illegally detained each year in black jails in Beijing alone is as high as 10,000, though that number includes individuals who are detained on multiple occasions.''

Despite dozens of cases closely documented by reporters and lawyers, in June the Government told the United Nations Human Rights Council ''there are no black jails in the country''.

Local judicial systems are usually impotent to deal with complaints made against local officials, as they are run by those same officials. Complainants typically try to petition higher tiers of government so they can deal with officials who are not involved with their immediate problems.

Professor Yu Jianrong, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that only one out of 632 petitioners he surveyed in Beijing had their complaints successfully resolved.

LNK

Human Rights Watch report, An Alleyway In Hell: Chinese petitioners end up in 'black jails'

Human Rights Watch report, An Alleyway In Hell: Chinese petitioners end up in 'black jails'

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