2014-10-21
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Chinese police take away an elderly woman for petitioning on Tiananmen Square, Dec. 4, 2013.
AFP
Eighty percent of people held in China’s unofficial detention centers, or “black jails,” are female, and many suffer routine abuse at the hands of their captors, according to a report published on Tuesday by the overseas-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) group.
Published as Beijing’s women’s rights record comes up for review by the United Nations, the report documents around 1,000 cases of secret detention and abuse of women in the country’s black jails, which are often used to silence those pursuing complaints against the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Titled, “We’ll Beat You to Death With Impunity,” the report highlights the case of Ding Hongfen, who will stand trial in the eastern province of Jiangsu on Saturday for “intentional damage to property,” after she helped organize a jailbreak to free 12 people being held in a black jail.
With the help of other activists, Ding—herself a former black jail inmate—broke into the facility in Jiangsu’s Wuxi city in June 2013 and helped the detainees to escape.
Ding and the others are facing likely prison time in retaliation for uncovering the “black jail” and for the daring rescue, CHRD said in a statement on its website.
According to the report, black jails are now beginning to replace the abolished “re-education through labor” camps, a police-run system of administrative sentences used to lock up perceived troublemakers without trial.
CHRD described black jails as “a wide array of holding cells where an individual can be detained for an indeterminate period of time on orders of government officials, without any legal recourse.”
It said many of the women held in black jails are among the most vulnerable in Chinese society, including the elderly, migrant workers, forced evictees, women with disabilities, and mothers with young children.
Sexual abuse of inmates is rife, the report found.
‘Appalling abuses’
“Inside these shadowy detention cells, the predominantly female detainees … are subjected to appalling abuses, from physical and sexual assaults to deprivation of medical treatment,” CHRD said.
“We call them ‘black jails’ because they’re illegal, often in secret locations, they’re covered up by the government, and their victims are silenced,” CHRD international director Renee Xia said in a statement emailed to RFA.
“The fact that these sprawling facilities disproportionately affect women testifies to the widespread state-sponsored violence against women,” she added.
The group quoted a Chinese official as saying that “there is no such thing” as black jails during testimony to the United Nations, and called on the government to acknowledge the existence of such facilities, which include large holding centers like Majialou and Jiujingzhuang used to detain petitioners who try to pursue complaints in Beijing.
It said routine abuse of women was of particular concern.
