UN: China Torture Still Widespread

First Investigator To Visit Country Says Gov’t Obstructing Work

(AP) 
Those groups have all been branded as subversive by China's ruling Communist Party and are frequently detained, imprisoned and sent to “re-education” labor camps.

"Re-education through labor and similar measures of forced re-education in prisons, pretrial detention centers and psychiatric hospitals should ... be abolished," Nowak's statement said.

Human rights groups say many people from those groups are tortured to death. Authorities usually tell relatives they died of natural causes or committed suicide.

Nowak urged China to further develop its criminal system to encourage fair trials and ensure that dissidents and other groups are not imprisoned under vaguely worded state security laws.

"Many steps need to be taken to build up a system that respects the rule of law," he said.

Nowak said he met with about 30 people in detention, but could not give details on many of them because they spoke to him on condition of anonymity.

He brought up the case of He Depu, a dissident serving a prison sentence for subversion after he was arrested for signing a letter to Communist Party delegates urging political reforms.

Nowak said he was subjected to 85 days of torture, including being forced to stay in one position and not being allowed to sleep. "It breaks you," Nowak said.

One case that provoked rare discussion of the topic in state-controlled media centered on a man in central China who was released in April after 11 years in prison when his wife, whom he had been accused of murdering, turned up alive.

She Xianglin said that for 10 days and nights he denied killing his wife. But police kept him awake, interrogating him almost constantly, until finally the former security guard signed a confession that he says he didn't even read.

Nowak will include his findings in a report to be submitted at next year's meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission.