请输入您要查询的百科知识:

 

词条 Black jails
释义

  1. Background

  2. Treatment of detainees

      Accounts  

  3. Official stance

  4. See also

  5. References

  6. External links

{{Use American English|date = February 2019}}{{Short description|Abusive extralegal detection centers in China}}{{for|the American military prison|Black jail}}{{update|date=January 2019|reason=the references, most of which are from 2009 and earlier.}}

Black jails ({{zh|c={{linktext|黑監獄}}|p={{linktext|hēijiānyù}}}}) are a network of extralegal detention centers established by Chinese security forces and private security companies[1] across the People's Republic of China in recent years. They are used mainly to detain, without trial, petitioners (上访者, shangfangzhe), who travel to seek redress for grievances unresolved at the local level. The right to petition was available in ancient China, and was later revived by the communists, with important differences.

Black jails have no official or legal status, differentiating them from detention centers, the criminal arrest process, or formal sentencing to jail or prison. They are in wide use in Beijing, in particular, and serve as holding locations for the many petitioners who travel to the central Office of Letters and Calls to petition.[2][3]

The jails were introduced to replace the Custody and Repatriation system after it was abolished in 2003 following the notorious Sun Zhigang incident. The existence of such jails is acknowledged by at least part of the CCP officialdom, following a police raid of one of them and criminal trial of the company running it.[4]

According to human rights groups, black jails are a growing industry. The system includes so-called "interceptors" (截访者, literally "inquiry-stopper"),[5] or "black guards",[6] often sent by local or regional authorities, who abduct petitioners and hold them against their will or bundle them onto a bus to send them back to where they came from.[7] Non-government sources have estimated the number of black jails in operation to be between 7 and 50. The facilities may be located in state-owned hotels, hostels, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, residential buildings, or government ministry buildings, among others.

Background

The appearance of black jails was the authorities' response to the use of the "letters and calls" system (also known as "petitioning"), which attempts to resolve disputes at the local level.[8]

As a modern version of the imperial tradition, reinstated by the communists after 1949, the petitioning system permits citizens to report local abuse of power to higher levels of government. Because local courts are beholden to local officials, however, and since pursuing redress through the legal system is too expensive for rural Chinese, petitioning in modern China has become the only channel for seeking redress.[8]

Petitioners may begin their attempts for redress at the local-level letters and calls office, which are located in courthouses or in township-level government offices. If unsatisfied, they can move up the hierarchy to provincial level offices and, at the highest level, the State Bureau for Letters and Visits in Beijing.[9][10]

The number of people using the petitioning system has increased since 1993, to the extent that the system has been strained for years. Official statistics indicate that petition offices annually handled around 10 million inquiries and complaints from petitioners from 2003 to 2007.[11] However, despite its enduring nature and political support, the system has never been an effective mechanism for dealing with the complaints brought to it – largely because it is chronically overwhelmed by the number of people seeking redress.[12]

Allegedly, local officials, with the tolerance of public security authorities, establish the black jails as a way to ensure that complainants are detained, punished, and sent home so that these officials will not suffer demerits under rules that impose bureaucratic penalties when there is a large flow of petitioners from their areas. Black jails are used to protect government officials at the county, municipal, and provincial levels from financial and career advancement penalties. Unpublished local government documents describe penalties levied against local officials who fail to take decisive action when petitioners from their geographical area seek legal redress in provincial capitals and Beijing. The operators of black jails allegedly receive from those local-level governments daily cash payments of 150 yuan (US$22) to 200 yuan (US$29) per person.[13]

Treatment of detainees

Human Rights Watch published the report An Alleyway in Hell dedicated to exploring the issue. It documents how government officials, security forces, and their agents routinely abduct people, usually petitioners, off the streets of Beijing and other Chinese cities, "strip them of their possessions, and imprison them."[13]

According to reporters visiting the jails, those detained inside them are beaten, starved, and sometimes hosed down with water.[14] 20 or 30 people may be forced to inhabit a single room, including those suffering from disabilities. Many are deprived of food, sleep, and medical care, and are subject to theft and extortion by their guards. They have no access to family members or to legal counsel or courts. Thousands of people are abducted off the streets of Chinese cities and held incommunicado for weeks or months in these conditions. The makeshift jails are found in state-owned hostels, hotels, nursing homes, and mental hospitals, among other locations.[15]

Accounts

Numerous accounts of conditions inside the institutions have made their way into Western media and human rights groups reports. For example, one 46-year-old former detainee from Jiangsu province, who spent more than a month in a black jail, "cried with fear and frustration as she recalled her abduction. [The abductors] are inhuman...two people dragged me by the hair and put me into the car. My two hands were tied up and I couldn't move. Then [after arriving back in Jiangsu] they put me inside a room where there were two women who stripped me of my clothes...[and] beat my head [and] used their feet to stomp my body," the former detainee said.[16]

Official stance

{{see also|Human Rights in China#Counterarguments by the PRC government}}

The authorities have repeatedly denied the existence of black jails. In an April 2009 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) press conference, an official responded to an Al Jazeera correspondent's query about black jails by stating categorically that, "Things like this do not exist in China." In June 2009, the Chinese government asserted in the Outcome Report of the United Nations Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review of China's human rights record that, "There are no black jails in the country."[13]

However, in September 2010, it was reported that Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau officials have detained Zhang Jun, chairman of "Anyuanding Security Service Company", and Zhang Jie, general manager of this company, for "illegally detaining people and illegal business operation". The company started business in 2004. In 2008, it began to help Beijing liaison offices of local governments to stop petitioners from their regions from petitioning in Beijing. The company employees first lied to the petitioners, telling them that their lodging has been provided. Then, the company employees took them to abandoned hotels or rented houses in suburban Beijing, seized their IDs and phones, and locked them up until the liaison offices told the company to help send the petitioners back to their hometowns. Later, the company expanded its business and got more clients including even remote village governments to help the local governments "maintain stability".

On 15 May 2010, a guard of a black jail located in a Beijing hotel received his final judgment of eight years of imprisonment for raping a female petitioner who had been illegally held in custody.[17]

See also

  • Law enforcement in the People's Republic of China
  • Weiquan movement
  • Petitioning (China)
  • Laogai

References

{{SpecialChars
| image = Zhongwen.svg
| special = Traditional Chinese text
| fix = Help:Multilingual support (East Asian)
| characters = Chinese characters
}}
1. ^{{cite news|url=http://www.chinavalue.net/Finance/Blog/2010-9-29/482946.aspx|title=安元鼎:北京截访"黑监狱"调查 |date= 24 September 2010}}
2. ^{{cite news|url=http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/petitioner-11202008094643.html|title='Black Jail' Plea from Hospital |date= 20 November 2008|publisher=Radio Free Asia|accessdate = 7 May 2009}}
3. ^Black jail guard convicted of rape, Associated Press, 12 November 2009
4. ^{{cite news|title=北京昌平区政府承认"黑监狱"属实 拒透露细节|url=http://news.china.com/zh_cn/social/1007/20110803/16684230.html|date = 3 August 2011}}
5. ^({{zh|c={{linktext|截|访|者}}}})
6. ^{{cite news|title=A Day in the Life of a Beijing 'Black Guard': A Henan native collected his pay and quit his job stopping petitioners from airing their grievances in Beijing. Then he told Caixin how he went about his work|url=http://english.caixin.com/2013-04-02/100509391.html|accessdate=3 April 2013|newspaper=Caixin|date=2 April 2013|author=Lan Fang|author2=Ren Zhongyuan}}
7. ^{{cite news|url=http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/connectasia/stories/200903/s2514076.htm|title=China using 'black jails' to prevent dissent|date=12 March 2009|publisher=Radio Australia|accessdate = 7 May 2009}}
8. ^Human Rights Watch, [https://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/11/12/alleyway-hell-0 "An Alleyway in Hell"], 12 November 2009
9. ^HRW's "Alleyway" citing Li Li, "Life in a Struggle," Beijing Review, 4 May 2005, http://www.bjreview.cn/EN/En-2005/05-45-e/china-1.htm
10. ^HRW's "Alleyway" citing Jonathan K. Ocko, "I'll take it all the way to Beijing: Capital appeals in the Qing," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 47.2 (May 1988), p.294
11. ^HRW's "Alleyway" citing Li Huizi and Zhou Erjie, "China's public complaint department busiest office in Beijing," Xinhua News Agency, 2 September 2007, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-09/02/content_6142475.htm (accessed 11 August 2009)
12. ^HRW's "Alleyway" citing Carl F. Minzner, "Xinfang: An Alternative to the Formal Chinese Legal System," Stanford Journal of International Law, vol. 42:1 (2006).
13. ^Human Rights Watch, [https://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/11/02/china-secret-black-jails-hide-severe-rights-abuses "China: Secret “Black Jails” Hide Severe Rights Abuses"], 12 November 2009
14. ^Hartley, Aidan. "The terrible secrets of Beijing’s "black jails" {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090415230956/http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/247856/the-terrible-secrets-of-beijings-black-jails.thtml |date=15 April 2009 }}" The Spectator. 13 October 2007
15. ^Human Rights Watch, [https://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/11/12/alleyway-hell-0 "An Alleyway in Hell"], 12 November 2009
16. ^{{cite web |url=https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/11/02/china-secret-black-jails-hide-severe-rights-abuses |title=China Secret Blak Jails Hide Severe Rights Abuses |date=2 November 2009 |accessdate=21 March 2014 |publisher=Human Rights Watch}}
17. ^{{cite news | url=http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-09/27/content_11351127.htm | newspaper=China Daily | title='Black jails' investigated for illegally holding petitioners | date=27 September 2010 | accessdate=17 March 2019 }}

External links

  • China crawls slowly towards judicial reform, by Thomas E. Kellogg and Keith Hand, Asia Times. 25 January 2008.
  • Rise of Rights? China Digital Times. 27 May 2005
  • Hostages of the State TIME Magazine. 16 June 2003.
  • {{Cite journal|url=http://ftp.fas.org/sgp/othergov/wlb/200307.pdf|title=China – Forced Detention and Repatriation System Abolished|publisher=Law Library of Congress|work=World Law Bulletin|date=July 2003|accessdate=15 January 2013|pages=6–7|deadurl=yes|archiveurl=http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20151212051612/http://ftp.fas.org/sgp/othergov/wlb/200307.pdf|archivedate=12 December 2015|df=dmy-all}}
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20090430010156/http://www.hrichina.org/public/contents/article?revision_id=4150&item_id=4149 Use of Custody and Repatriation detention triples in 10 years] Human Rights in China
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20090430102623/http://www.cecc.gov/pages/roundtables/060203/yi.php Kidnapping by Police: The Sun Zhigang Case Exposes "Custody and Repatriation"] Testimony before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 2 June 2003
  • China's 'black jails' uncovered Aljazeera. 27 April 2009
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20090415230956/http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/247856/the-terrible-secrets-of-beijings-black-jails.thtml The terrible secrets of Beijing’s "black jails"] The Spectator. 13 October 2007
{{Use dmy dates|date=February 2011}}{{DEFAULTSORT:Black Jails}}

6 : Chinese law|Law enforcement in China|Family registers|Political repression in China|Human rights in China|History of the People's Republic of China

随便看

 

开放百科全书收录14589846条英语、德语、日语等多语种百科知识,基本涵盖了大多数领域的百科知识,是一部内容自由、开放的电子版国际百科全书。

 

Copyright © 2023 OENC.NET All Rights Reserved
京ICP备2021023879号 更新时间:2024/11/12 0:51:09