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China
Mistreating Detained Dissidents - Reports
Beijing
police have detained two relatives of a jailed housing rights
activist, and prison officials are also mistreating an ethnic
Mongolian political prisoner, according to human rights groups.
Ye Mingjun and Ye Guoqiang, son and brother of Ye Guozhu,
sentenced for organising protests against forced evictions for
the 2008 Beijing Olympics, are being held incommunicado, Amnesty
International said in a statement.
Police came for Mingjun at his house on Sept. 29, and later told
his family he was being held for "inciting subversion of state
power", Amnesty said.
The police had detained Guoqiang earlier in the day for
protesting forced evictions, also for the Olympics, in a
southern part of Beijing, the group added.
"They are held incommunicado, putting them at high risk of
torture or other ill-treatment," said Amnesty, which has
previously warned Guozhu has been beaten and tortured with
electric shocks in jail.
The government has been cracking down on dissent ahead of a key
Communist Party meeting that opens on Oct. 15.
Amnesty said earlier this week that Chinese lawyer Li Heping --
who has represented an online dissident, an imprisoned
environmentalist and the leader of a Christian sect -- had been
abducted and beaten by unidentified men.
In a separate report, the health and prison conditions of ethnic
Mongolian dissident Hada continue to deteriorate, the Southern
Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre cited his son Uiles as
saying.
Hada was tried behind closed doors in China's northern Inner
Mongolia region in 1996 and sentenced to 15 years in jail for
separatism and spying and his support for the Southern Mongolian
Democratic Alliance, which sought greater rights for ethnic
Mongolians.
"My father has already become totally grey-haired, and he looked
so thin and small. He lives in an eight-inmate, small prison
cell where there is no sunlight," Uiles was quoted as saying,
after visiting his father in jail in August.
Hada is being kept apart from other prisoners, who are not
allowed to speak to him, and has become incontinent, Uiles said.
"According to him, two people are specifically monitoring him in
the prison unit yard. He was not allowed to leave the unit gate,
and talking to others is prohibited," his son added. |