Dharamsala, October 16 – The trials of 21 defendants accused of participating in the July 2009 protests in Xinjiang did not meet minimum international standards of due process and fair trials, Human Rights Watch said yesterday.
On October 12, the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court sentenced six men to death and another to life imprisonment. On October 14, another six men were sentenced to death, three of them with a two-year reprieve, while others were sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. All the trials, the New York based right group said, took place without “prior public notification and were conducted in less than a day”.
“There is no doubt that serious criminal acts were committed in July’s unrest in Xinjiang, but it serves neither justice nor stability for the government to ignore minimum standards of due process,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The lack of transparency about how these trials were conducted undermines confidence in the verdicts.”
The protests of July this year in Urumqi , according to government figures, left 197 people dead, 134 of them Han Chinese, and wounded some 1,600 people.
Human Rights Watch accused China of “serious violations” of legal rights of the defendants. In July this year, Judicial authorities in China had warned lawyers against taking up cases related to the riots in Urumqi, and issued orders to lawyers against commenting on the trials, Human Rights Watch argued. The Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court had violated China’s own criminal procedure law by not giving public notification of the trials and failing to hold open, public trials, it added.
Human Rights Watch also expressed its concerns about the fate of hundreds others still awaiting trials in Chinese prisons since the violence in Urumqi that was one of the worst ethnic unrest in decades.
