China mistreating detained dissidents -reports Fri Oct 5, 2007 12:03am EDT Email | Print | Digg | Reprints | Single Page | Recommend (0) [-] Text [+]
powered by Sphere Featured Broker sponsored linkBEIJING, Oct 5 (Reuters) - 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.
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No.797 - 2007/10/08(Mon) 14:45:58
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