Reuters North American News Service, November 28th, 2007
BEIJING, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Arrests in China on charges of
"endangering state security" nearly doubled last year, a sign
of increasing pressure on political activism, a U.S.-based
human rights watchdog said on Wednesday.
Statistics in the China Law Yearbook show prosecutors
approved the arrest of 604 people on state security charges in
2006, up from 296 the previous year, the San Francisco-based
Dui Hua Foundation said.
"This dramatic increase in arrests confirms the heightened
crackdown on dissent in China that we've been witnessing since
at least the middle of 2005," Dui Hua executive director John
Kamm said in a statement.
The increase comes despite the pressure on China's ruling
Communist Party to improve its human rights record ahead of the
2008 Olympics in Beijing.
State security cases encompass a variety of crimes,
including subversion, providing state secrets to overseas
entities and "splittism", the charge levied against those who
advocate independence or autonomy for the border regions of
Tibet and Xinjiang.
Dui Hua, which works to secure the release of political
prisoners in China, maintains a database of such detainees.
But the group said that few of those listed in the Law
Yearbook on state security charges appeared in their database,
suggesting that political arrests in China have been taking
place on a larger scale and under greater secrecy than in past.
Among those implicated on such charges were Gao Zhisheng,
an outspoken human rights lawyer and two sons of Rebiya Kadeer,
an activist member of China's ethnic Uighur minority.
(Reporting by Lindsay Beck; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
