BEIJING
An international human rights organization has found that suspects in pretrial detention in China continue to face abusive interrogations despite recent measures against torture by police and wrongful convictions.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a 145-page report Wednesday on its findings, which included detainees being forced to spend days hung by their wrists, shackled to metal “tiger chairs” and treated abusively by fellow detainees referred to as “cell bosses” keeping watch for police.
Sophie Richardson, HRW’s China director, said in a statement that despite years of reform, “police are torturing criminal suspects to get them to confess to crimes and courts are convicting people who confessed under torture.”
She added that the group “heard appalling stories of detainees being hung by the wrists, shackled for years, and terrorized by cell bosses, yet having no real means to hold their tormentors to account.”
She warned that new measures would be unlikely to do away with routine torture if police were not held responsible for abuse and suspects were not accompanied by lawyers during interrogations.
The group prepared the report, titled “Tiger Chairs and Cell Bosses: Police Torture of Criminal Suspects in China,” based on analysis of hundreds of published recent court verdicts countrywide and interviews with 48 recent detainees, family members, lawyers and former officials. It also surveyed around 158,000 court verdicts in cases where suspects claimed to have been tortured, posted on the Supreme People’s Court website between Jan. 1 and April 30 last year.
“It’s hard to square such consistent accounts of abuse with claims by President Xi Jinping that the government respects the rule of law,” Richardson said.
The statement said that while anti-torture measures adopted since 2009 seemingly reduced certain abuses, police had found ways of skirting the restrictions.
While less abuses may have taken place within detention centers before trial, some officers would allegedly remove suspects from such facilities for interrogations or would employ forms of torture that do not cause visible harm.
According to the report, videotaped interrogations were also “routinely manipulated,” with officers torturing suspects outside the facilities before returning them to videotape confessions.
It cited former detainees and their family members as mentioning the difficulty of finding attorneys who would challenge police over allegations of mistreatment, as well as the inclination of medical personnel not to report apparent torture.
The statement called on Chinese authorities to act quickly toward legislation on suspects’ right to remain silent, a reduction in detention times before a suspect appears before a judge, and the presence of lawyers during interrogations.
In November, the United Nations Committee against Torture is set to review the country’s measures to end torture.
“China’s upcoming appearance before the UN Committee against Torture will put Beijing’s record under global scrutiny,” Richardson said. “If the government fails to take further steps against routine torture, it will raise larger questions about its willingness to carry out reforms that will improve public confidence in the country’s judicial system.”
