This study evaluates the effect of the 1996 amendment of China’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL, enacted in 1979) and shows that the Chinese authorities have circumvented the CPL’s rights safeguards by exploiting loopholes, watering down existing provisions, and blatantly violating the law. In some areas, the revisions have actually resulted in greater limitations on rights. Includes HRIC’s recommendations on steps that China and the international community can take to improve respect for international human rights norms in China’s criminal justice system.
This report describes and examines China's state secrets system and shows how it allows and even promotes human rights violations by undermining the rights to freedom of expression and information, and by maintaining a culture of secrecy that has a chilling effect on efforts to develop the rule of law and an independent civil society.
In addition to an extensive compilation of laws, regulations, and official documents, many in English translation for the first time, this report includes concrete recommendations relating to governance, legislative amendments, and promoting China’s compliance with and implementation of its international human rights obligations.
The focus of this report is the legal status of internal migrants in four of China's major cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. It describes the discriminatory laws and policies that make internal migrants second class citizens, essentially leaving 10 to 20 percent of the poorest residents of these cities virtually without rights. Since the poorest and most vulnerable among the rural-to-urban migrants are least able to circumvent the mechanisms of control, due to their lack of money and influence, and are most likely to be subject to official and popular discrimination, their experience is the report's principal subject matter.
Based on firsthand accounts and previously undisclosed Communist Party of China and government documents, this report unveils for the first time the complex architecture of law, regulation, and policy in Xinjiang that denies Uighurs religious freedom, and by extension freedom of association, assembly, and expression. The report also shows how China is using the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent "war on terror" as a cover for targeting Uighurs.
