China on execution frenzy

Jagat · July 6, 2001

<font color=#666999>And to think that next month, the IOC is going to give China the Olympic Games! I think that there should be an international boycott, like with the Moscow games. Athletes should refuse, on principle, to go there. This is all about multinational corporations getting into the billion-person market. What's 1,700 in a population of 1,200,000,000? Peanuts.

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<h3>Amnesty International acuses China of “execution frenzy”</h3>

Associated Press

Beijing — China executed more people in the last three months than the rest of the world did in the past three years - 1,781 people put to death in a government campaign against crime, Amnesty International said Friday.

The London-based rights group said China has put people to death not just for violent crimes, but also for bribery, embezzlement, fraud, pimping, stealing gasoline, selling harmful foods and drug offenses.

“The campaign is nothing short of an execution frenzy, a huge waste of human life,” Amnesty said.

Amnesty said its figures of at least 1,781 executions and 2,960 death sentences since Strike Hard was launched in April were tallied from publicly available reports.

In contrast, Amnesty counted 1,751 executions in the rest of the world over the past three years. But only a fraction of death sentences and executions in China are publicly reported and the actual number of people put to death is far higher, the group said.

Amnesty, which opposes use of the death penalty, released its report one week before the International Olympic Committee votes on whether Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics, or one of four other cities, including Paris and Toronto.

Critics say Chinese human rights abuses make Beijing unfit to host the games. Beijing officials say an Olympics would promote human rights in China. But they also argue that political considerations should not be used to judge Beijing's Olympic bid.

Amnesty expressed fears that in their rush to produce results for the anti-crime drive, called “Strike Hard,” authorities risk executing innocent people. Police and prosecutors have been urged to cut corners to secure quick arrests and trials, it said.

In southern Hunan province, police reported solving 3,000 cases in two days in April, Amnesty said. In southwestern Sichuan province, police said they apprehended 19,446 people in six days, it said.

“The potential for miscarriages of justice, arbitrary sentencing and the execution of innocent people is immense,” the group said.

Most executions take place after sentencing rallies in front of massive crowds in sports stadiums and public squares, it said.

Orginally targeted at organized and violent crime, Chinese authorities have greatly expanded the scope of the Strike Hard campaign, Amnesty said.

In Xinjiang, a restive western region of China where militant Muslims are fighting Chinese rule, authorities have executed people accused of separatism, the group said.

Authorities in the prosperous southern province of Guangdong, next to Hong Kong, and other regions have executed people for fraud, forging currency and “disrupting the stock market” in an effort to curb economic crimes before China joins the World Trade Organization, Amnesty said.

China expects to join the rule-making body for world trade by early next year at the latest.

July 6, 2001

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<h2>BOYCOTT CHINA!</h2>

[This message has been edited by rand0M aXiS (edited 07-06-2001).]

mahak · July 6, 2001

Haribol, I am no chicom symp, but I do know about the danger of stone throwers who have lotsa windows of glass.

The US has olympics all the time, every other one, yet we kill our own at alarming pace. Our prisons are populated with greater percentage than Iran, Iraq, Russia, South Africa, Cuba, North Korea, all combined. And the most absurd fact is that the majority of those in prisons are for crimes that are not against persons or property, but for purely political reasons, subversion, drug use and trafficing, etc.

The absurdity of legislative body destroying constitutional balance of power by imposing "mandatory sentencing" has had the effect of allowing child abusers, rapists, murderers, etc, run free due to lack of prison space. Why the lack of prison space? Because a nineteen year old single, black mother was offered $100 to drive a car across town and park it. The judge knew this, the jury knew this, the DA and public attourney knew this, but the legislators who disregard the balance of power demanded by the constitution decided that her mandatory sentence is thirty years minimum for the ounce of pure rock cocaine in the trunk. The judge could not judge, the DA and defense atty could not do a deal, and her cell is full, so your kids get to be stalked by the predator. ZERO tolerance here for any policy with the words "zero tolerance" in it, because the phrase means totalitarianism worse than any of our favored saddams and fidels.

I am for the death penalty, yet I am against perverted and unqualified and bigoted judges that make blacks die at such a great proportion to whites even though they do not commit more capital crimes. I am against jury selection among folks who are the dumbest and most underpaid members of society. Imagine, payin thirty bucks a day for someone who will decide life or death. Someone who makes this decision should be a trained professional understanding psychology, penology, etc, not someone so ignorant that they cannot get out of jury duty.

So, yeah, they mow em down elsewhere, and tsk, tsk, tsk on them, but what about our guys and our govt, what about that smug pervert who thought it would be cute to shoot a mama while she held a baby, where is his death chamber. What about the CIA/KGB mindcontrollers who decide that an enclave of honest, religious and independant folks who decide to try communal responsibility must be shown to be evil by spraying flammable substance into where the children were home-schooled and lit them on fire while the nation watched, cursing the scholar who decided to work on bible translations, and was available for personal arrest every day at three PM at the local watering hole.

As bro bob cries in "the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll", "Bury that rag deep within your face, because NOW is the time for your tears."

latah, mad mahax

July 6, 2001

<h3>Organs For Sale: A gruesome human rights abuse, courtesy of China</h3>

One of the most gruesome human-rights abuses in today's world is China's trafficking of its own executed prisoners' body parts to American residents. This atrocity was documented by testimony given June 27th during a U.S. congressional hearing.

Congressman Henry Hyde, the chairman on International Relations, in a press release stated:

By some estimates 90 percent of transplants performed in China use human organs taken from executed prisoners. Amnesty International reports that some prisoners are executed for such crimes as "counter-revolutionary offenses" a code word for pro-democracy activism. Holiday executions and "Strike Hard" campaigns are designed to facilitate organ harvesting of executed prisoners with the payments for transplants funneled to China's military.

During her opening statement of the hearing, Rep. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairman of the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights referred to a 1984 document from China's Public Health Ministry entitled "Provisions Regulations on the Use of Dead Bodies or Organs from Condemned Criminals.This document states that those who are sentenced to death are to be executed immediately by means of shooting. We will hear testimony about how this translates into a shot to the heart of corneas are needed, and a shot to the back of the head for other organs. Family members of the executed prisoners are forced to pay for the bullets used."

With the assistance of a translator, Wang Guoqi, a former doctor at a Chinese People's Liberation Army hospital who left the PRC in Spring, 2000, testified: "My work required me to remove skin and corneas from the corpses of over one hundred executed prisoners, and, on a couple of occasions, victims of intentionally botched executions. It is with deep regret and remorse for my actions that I stand here today testifying against the practices of organ and tissue sales from death row prisoners."

Dr. Wang detailed one incident in October, 1995 in Hebei Province that has "tortured" his conscience ever since, when a prisoner did not die after receiving the execution shot to the head. Dr. Wang and other burn surgeons were ordered to harvest skin off of the half-dead and convulsing prisoner whose kidneys were extracted immediately by three other doctors. Inside the ambulance, they began to remove the skin, but due to an angry growing crowd outside, they left the job "half-done and the half-dead corpse was thrown in a plastic bag onto the flatbed of a crematorium truck." Dr. Wang stated, "Whatever impact I have made in the lives of burn victims and transplant patients does not excuse the unethical and immoral manner of extracting organs." Dr. Wang is seeking political asylum in the U.S.

Dr. Thomas Diflo, the director of the Renal Transplant Program at New York University Medical Center, testified that he and his colleagues in the New York area provide follow-up care for Chinese-American patients who had returned from China with "freshly" transplanted kidneys from executed prisoners in China. He was repulsed after learning the source of his patients' new kidneys, and personally questioned any role he might be playing in facilitating China's "nonconsensual taking of organs and making human body parts a commodity.These were patients who needed, and deserved, our good care, yet they had obtained their organs under what we considered morally and ethically reprehensible circumstances," he Dr. Diflo stated.

The New York doctor told how he brought his concerns before Ethics Committee at his hospital and the press, and how he is personally and professionally determined "to get to the root of the problem by attempting to 'spread the word.'" During the hearing, Dr. Diflo insisted that "the rumors and allegations about the use of prisoners' organs in China are unequivocally true." He urged the US Congress to implement "any sanctions or actions that can be taken against China to force them to desist in this outrageous violation of human rights."

Harry Wu, the executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation who suffered in China's Laogai for 19 years, testified that he has been aware of this cruel reality of selling human organs from executed Chinese prisoners since 1985. During his testimony, Mr. Wu explained, "The Chinese government controls and operates a system to harvest organs from executed prisoners and ensures its secrecy." He stated, "There is no national public registry for people to voluntarily register their consent to donate their organs after their death. Only this year small-scale experiments commenced in Shanghai to open city-wide registry. That's as far as it goes outside of the source of thousands of executed prisoners." Mr. Wu explained, "Families are often not notified of the date of the execution until after it is already carried out, making it impossible for them to offer consent for the harvesting of organs."

Mr. Wu presented a copy of the Laogai Research Foundation's May 2001 report, "Communist Charity, A Comprehensive Report on the Harvesting of Organs from the Executed Prisoners of the People's Republic of China" to the House International Operations ad Human Rights Subcommittee. In his report, Mr. Wu further condemns China's practice for its failure to "involve few charitable intentions toward ailing patients. As all official realized the revenue source available from desperate and dying individuals and the abundance of organs to be harvested from death row prisoners, greed became an obvious priority. It is generally not the elderly Chinese peasant on dialysis that receives a kidney from an executed criminal, rather, it is usually rich foreigners and politically or economically privileged Chinese.

Professor Nancy Scheler-Hughes, program director of Organ Watch, congratulated Dr. Thomas Dilio and Harry Wu for their courage to expose China's lucrative and state-sponsored business. During her testimony, she explained her expertise in monitoring organ-transplantation programs throughout the world. While she cited to illicit practices of organ harvesting in other areas of the world, she stated how, " the complicity of Chinese doctors in these highly medicalized executions whereby the condemned prisoner is carefully examined, incubated, and "prepped" for organs harvesting minutes before he is executed by a bullet to the head, is reminiscent of Nazi medicine as practiced in the death camps."

Members of Congress who attended the hearing expressed their dedication to promoting a bipartisan effort ensure that the U.S. does not become an accomplice to the PRC and their deplorable practice. Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen introduced H.R. 2030 to prohibit issuance of a visa, or admission to the U.S., of any Chinese physician entering the U.S. for the purpose of training in organ or bodily tissue transplantation. She reminded all present, "It has been said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing."