CHINA/FILE: Amnesty International says Beijing has broken its Olympic human rights promises

Record ID: 329629

  • Title: CHINA/FILE: Amnesty International says Beijing has broken its Olympic human rights promises
  • Date: 29th July 2008
  • Summary: STILL PICTURES OF AIDS PATIENTS ON COMPUTER SCREEN STILL PICTURE OF AIDS PATIENT ON COMPUTER SCREEN
  • Embargoed: 13th August 2008 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement,Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA32L7FZRAIPK7QF7FM6UT0NVE
  • Story Text: Amnesty International says China has failed to honour its Olympic human rights pledges, maintaining that rights abuses have increased in the run up to the Games.
    Rights group Amnesty International says China has failed right up to the last, to honour its Olympic human rights pledges, in a report summarising what it calls Beijing's "deteriorating record" over the past seven years.
    With just over a week to go before the Games kick off to great fanfare in Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium on August 8, the rights group gave a scathing final assessment of China's track record since 2001, when it won the right to host the Beijing Olympics.
    In an eleventh-hour news conference on Monday (July 28), Roseann Rife the deputy programme director for Asia Pacific's Amnesty International called on Chinese authorities to improve their human rights record.
    Mark Allison, a researcher for Amnesty International's East Asia team, said that pleges by the Chinese authorities had not been upheld.
    Amnesty, like many other rights groups, maintains that in the run up to the Games, Beijing had in fact clamped down on human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers to "silence dissent" -- jailing high profile dissidents like Hu Jia, Ye Guozhu and Yang Chunlin, and often intimidating their families.
    Amnesty's report called on China to immediately free all prisoners of conscience, allow full media freedoms and halt the "clean-up" of dissent.
    Allison highlighted the case of Hu Jia, the Buddhist Chinese dissident outspoken on Tibet and other sensitive topics who was jailed for three-and-a-half years at the beginning of April.
    Starting with advocacy for rural AIDS sufferers, Hu emerged as one of the nation's most vocal advocates of democratic rights, religious freedom and self-determination for Tibet, shaken in March by protests and a security crackdown.
    Hu, 34, was found guilty in April of "inciting subversion of state power" for criticising the ruling Communist Party, a verdict that drew quick condemnation from the United States, Britain and the United Nations.
    Amnesty's assessment also highlighted other rights abuses, and made a plea to authorities to improve on a variety of areas.
    The authorities' control of domestic and foreign media was unacceptable despite Beijing's pledge to allow full media freedoms for foreign journalists in the run-up to the Games, the report said, and internet censorship and regulation had also been "increasingly tightened" as the Olympics approach.
    The spring unrest in Tibet and subsequent crackdown was highlighted as an instance of China overstepping its bounds in persecuting people without charge.
    Amnesty also blamed the International Olympic Committee for failing to put more pressure on China and of "sending a message that it is acceptable for a government to host the Olympic Games in an atmosphere characterised by repression and persecution".
    The report did note however that China had made some progress with death penalty reforms and to partially broaden the scope of foreign media coverage in China.
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