Amnesty: China executes 1,700 people in three months

By JOHN LEICESTER - Associated Press Writer Date: 07/06/01 9:34

BEIJING -- China executed more people in the last three months than the rest of the world did in the past three years -- 1,781 people put to death in a government campaign against crime, Amnesty International said today.

The London-based rights group said China has put people to death not just for violent crimes, but also for bribery, embezzlement, fraud, pimping, stealing gasoline, selling harmful foods and drug offenses.

"The campaign is nothing short of an execution frenzy, a huge waste of human life," Amnesty said.

The Chinese government did not comment on the Amnesty report. But China justifies the crackdown and harsh sentencing as necessary to ensure "social stability," a catchall phrase describing the Communist Party's unrivaled authority and control over society.

Amnesty said its figures of at least 1,781 executions and 2,960 death sentences -- since the anti-crime campaign called Strike Hard was launched in April -- were tallied from publicly available reports.

In contrast, Amnesty counted 1,751 executions in the rest of the world over the past three years. But only a fraction of death sentences and executions in China are publicly reported and the actual number of people put to death is far higher, the group said.

Amnesty, which opposes use of the death penalty, released its report one week before the International Olympic Committee votes on whether Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics, or one of four other cities, including Paris and Toronto.

Critics say Chinese human rights abuses make Beijing unfit to hold the games. Beijing officials say an Olympics would promote human rights in China. But they also argue that political considerations should not be used to judge Beijing's Olympic bid.

Amnesty expressed fears that in their rush to produce results for the anti-crime drive, called "Strike Hard," authorities risk executing innocent people. Police and prosecutors have been urged to cut corners to secure quick arrests and trials, it said.

In southern Hunan province, police reported solving 3,000 cases in two days in April, Amnesty said. In southwestern Sichuan province, police said they apprehended 19,446 people in six days, it said.

"The potential for miscarriages of justice, arbitrary sentencing and the execution of innocent people is immense," the group said.

Most executions take place after sentencing rallies in front of massive crowds in sports stadiums and public squares, it said.

Originally targeted at organized and violent crime, Chinese authorities have greatly expanded the scope of the Strike Hard campaign, Amnesty said.

In Xinjiang, a restive western region of China where militant Muslims are fighting Chinese rule, authorities have executed people accused of separatism, the group said.

Authorities in the prosperous southern province of Guangdong, next to Hong Kong, and other regions have executed people for fraud, forging currency and "disrupting the stock market" in an effort to curb economic crimes before China joins the World Trade Organization, Amnesty said.

China expects to join the rule-making body for world trade by early next year at the latest.

-- Anonymous, July 06, 2001

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Europeans decry America's use of death penalty

Anti-capital punishment groups say they hold U.S. government to higher standard than China, which executes more prisoners per year.

07/07/01

By PAMELA SAMPSON Of The Associated Press

PARIS -- Even though China puts far more prisoners to death each year than any other country, it is executions in the United States that spark the real outcry in Western Europe, where capital punishment has long been outlawed.

Europeans are troubled that the United States, with its deeply ingrained democratic values, invokes a punishment many consider barbaric and medieval.

"We don't expect the same from China," said Walter Schwimmer, secretary-general of the Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights institution.

Hands Off Cain, Italy's leading anti-death penalty group, has adopted the causes of a number of death row prisoners in the United States.

Such information is difficult to get in China, which according to the London-based rights group Amnesty International executed more people in the last three months than the rest of the world did in the past three years.

Amnesty said Friday that 1,781 people have been put to death since the Chinese government launched an anti-crime campaign called Strike Hard in April. There have been fewer than 20 executions in the United States in the same period.

"We are not anti-American," said Hands Off Cain's spokeswoman, Elisabetta Zamparutti. "It's just easier for us to know about prisoners from the United States because it is a democracy."

Europe's strong distaste for capital punishment is reflected in many institutions. Abolishing the death penalty is a requirement for membership in the 15-member European Union and the 43-nation Council of Europe.

On June 25, the Council of Europe threatened to remove the observer status of the United States and Japan unless they stopped all executions and moved to repeal the death penalty. The vote came after the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the first person to be put to death under U.S. federal law in 38 years.

Schwimmer said he believes McVeigh should have been spared, even though the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 took the lives of 168 people and was the worst act of domestic terrorism in the country's history.

"Everyone in Europe was shocked by the first execution under federal law -- even in the case of Timothy McVeigh, who was a brutal killer," Schwimmer said.

While the loss of observer status at the Council of Europe would have little practical effect, it could be embarrassing for the United States, which was voted off the U.N. Human Rights Commission in May.

President Bush, who supports the death penalty and vigorously applied it as Texas governor, drew protests when he visited Europe last month.

France, which last let its infamous guillotine drop in 1977, has been particularly critical of the death penalty. In March, President Jacques Chirac appealed for a world ban on capital punishment before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

After McVeigh's execution on June 11, French Education Minister Jack Lang told Europe-1 radio that Bush "should examine his conscience." Lang was part of a French delegation that worked on behalf of a U.S. prisoner, Odell Barnes, executed in Texas for rape and murder. Lang and other lawmakers claimed Barnes did not receive a fair trial.

Both the French and British governments insist they persistently press China over the issue during official visits.

Many Europeans consider executions to be barbaric, but a June 12 editorial in France's Le Monde newspaper suggested Europeans also relish having an issue with which to bash the United States.

"It allows them to affirm a moral and judicial superiority over the American power," the newspaper said.

-- Anonymous, July 07, 2001