Gesture Precedes Possible U.N. Vote
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
BEIJING, February 6 – The Chinese government has given U.S. officials a list of 51 political prisoners who have been granted sentence reductions or are being considered for early release, a gesture that comes as the Bush administration is weighing whether to sponsor a resolution criticizing China’s human rights record at a U.N. meeting next month.
The list was delivered last week to a State Department delegation visiting Beijing for discussions about resuming a formal U.S.-China dialogue on human rights, according to the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group in San Francisco that was also given a copy of the list by the Chinese.
China suspended the dialogue after the Bush administration sponsored a motion criticizing its record at last year’s meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. But China said in October that it was willing to resume the formal talks and officials have been meeting quietly with U.S. diplomats about the arrangements.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry referred questions about the prisoner list to the Justice Ministry, where repeated phone calls to the spokesman’s office went unanswered over the past few days. State Department officials also declined to comment on the list, citing sensitive negotiations with the Chinese.
John Kamm, executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, said the list included information about 56 people who have been imprisoned for political offenses in China. Fifty-one of them have been released early from prison, received sentence reductions or are being considered for reductions.
Of the remaining five, three were released from prison or labor camps after completing their full sentences and two are scheduled to complete their sentences and go free by May.
None of the political prisoners who received clemency is prominent. But Kamm said the list could represent a significant change in Chinese policy because more than half of the prisoners on it were previously unknown to foreign governments and human rights groups, including Chen Junzhi, a man serving an 18-year sentence for endangering state security, and Wangdu, a Tibetan sentenced to 17 years for inciting separatism.
China has been replying to inquiries about political prisoners by the United Nations and foreign governments since the early 1990s but usually limits its responses to information about individuals for whom a full name is provided.
“If they’re prepared to tell us now about people who we don’t know about, that’s a big change,” Kamm said. “This is the first time the Chinese government has done such a thing. They have very tentatively opened a new window and allowed light to be shed on dark places.”
Kamm said Chinese officials have indicated they are willing to continue volunteering information about prisoners. The shift is important, he said, because it moves China closer to providing complete lists of detainees in certain categories, including those unknown to outsiders. That would satisfy a standard requirement of international monitors who conduct prisoner visits.
China has long refused to allow outside inspectors, such as those from the International Committee of the Red Cross, to visit its prisons except under controlled conditions. Its rigid position has derailed several proposed tours by a U.N. special rapporteur to investigate allegations of torture in Chinese jails.
Though the document given to U.S. officials makes note of some sentence reductions that had been disclosed previously by China, much of the information is new. For example, the list includes information about 16 people convicted for spying for Taiwan and 13 Tibetan prisoners.
Thirteen of the 17 early releases reported, and 26 of the 29 sentence reductions given to people on the list who remain in prison, occurred last year or this year. The document says sentence reductions are “possible” in the coming months for five other prisoners.
Kamm said the flurry of activity was unusual because almost all of the prisoners were accused of “endangering state security” or “counterrevolution,” crimes defined vaguely in Chinese law and routinely used to punish dissidents. The law says sentence reductions for such prisoners should be “handled strictly,” and studies indicate they receive clemency at far lower rates than others in China’s prisons.
The ruling Communist Party replaced counterrevolutionary offenses with crimes of endangering state security in 1997, but officials said last year that about 600 people were still serving sentences for counterrevolution. The U.S. government and human rights groups have urged China for years to release them or review their cases for parole.
Chinese and U.S. officials held formal talks on the subject in late 2003 and early 2004. During the sessions, the Chinese insisted that counterrevolutionaries and those convicted of endangering state security were treated the same as other criminals concerning sentence reductions and parole, Kamm said.
The apparent increase in sentence reductions for the prisoners reported on the list suggests that officials in at least some provinces may be trying to comply with that policy, Kamm said. “It’s possible the talks have created an environment in which letting these people out, granting them clemency, is okay now,” he said.
Kamm said Chinese officials told him the list was the result of a general review of parole and sentence reduction practices nationwide. State newspapers have portrayed the review as an attempt to prevent criminals from improperly being released from prison early.
