China may adjust labor camp system
BEIJING --Chinese lawmakers will consider modifying a system that lets police send crime suspects to labor camps without trial, state media said Thursday.
However, the legislators apparently have no plan to ban it, as international right groups have recommended.
A new version of the "re-education through labor" system, or "laojiao," is one of 20 agenda items for the legislative session that opens Monday, the China Daily newspaper said.
The system has been widely criticized by the United Nations, the European Union and other organizations, who say it should be abolished as part of Beijing's acceptance of international legal norms.
The current system, in place in since 1957, allows police to incarcerate a crime suspect for up to four years. Critics say it is misused to detain political or religious activists, and violates suspects' rights.
The English-language China Daily noted that the draft law has been stalled on the legislative agenda for two years due to disagreements. It said there were still "lots of disagreements" this year.
"Re-education" through labor is used with people accused of offenses as minor as petty theft and prostitution. A court reviews cases after the suspects are sent to the labor camps.
Chinese-language media in Beijing have reported very little on the proposed changes, which Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, called a "telltale sign" that the law was unlikely to be passed this year.
"I don't think the (China Daily) article is a guarantee this law is going to be passed," he said. "You would have seen more stories in the Chinese language media."
Bequelin said the system needs to be abolished, not revamped, and that "re-education through labor is basically unconstitutional in China. Everybody in China, judges and lawyers, are against it, except the police."
The China Daily quoted Wang Gongyi, an academic from a government think tank, as saying that the system contradicts several parts of the Chinese Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a U.N. human rights treaty that China signed in 1998.
Bequelin said police like the system because it is flexible, allowing them to round up large groups of people and punish them without having to deal with a trial.
