By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ NOV. 12, 2015
BEIJING — Legal activists and those suspected of crimes in China are routinely abused and mistreated at the hands of law enforcement officials, a report released on Thursday by Amnesty International found, despite recent efforts by the government to crack down on inhumane judicial practices.
The report found that much of the abuse is directed at lawyers, who have come under increasing pressure amid a vigorous campaign by President Xi Jinping to rein in dissent and weaken a burgeoning human rights movement.
According to the report, one lawyer was strapped to a chair and hit over the head with a plastic jug filled with water until he passed out. Another reportedly spent 99 days in police custody, turning suicidal after the pain from being handcuffed had grown overwhelming.
Mr. Xi has promised to strengthen the rule of law in China, and the government has vowed to punish officers who extract confessions through torture.
But Mr. Xi’s legal overhauls have not resulted in a more humane system, the report contended, saying that the abuse of rights lawyers is common.
“These lawyers are actually trying to help, and the way they’re trying to do it is within the legal framework,” Patrick Poon, a researcher for Amnesty International based in Hong Kong, said in a telephone interview. “But they themselves become the victim of the legal system.”
In a statement on Thursday, Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, disputed the report’s findings and said the government was working to improve the judicial system and expand human rights.
“China is a country of rule of law,” Mr. Hong said. “China’s law clearly states extracting confession by torture is forbidden.”
The United Nations Committee Against Torture, a panel of experts that monitors the carrying out of a United Nations convention against cruel and inhumane treatment, is expected to examine China’s record this month in Geneva. In two weeks of public discussion, the committee will also look at Austria, Azerbaijan, Denmark and Jordan and Liechtenstein.
The report said that pressure to produce convictions in China had provided “an almost irresistible incentive for law enforcement agencies to obtain them by any means necessary,” resulting in an abundance of forced confessions.
In trying to challenge those confessions, many lawyers were unable to persuade judges that torture had taken place, the report said. In the report’s sample of 590 cases in which suspects said they had been tortured in 2015, judges agreed to throw out confessions in only 16 cases.
The Amnesty International report drew on interviews with 37 Chinese lawyers and a review of several hundred court cases. The report called on Chinese leaders to work more aggressively to prevent torture and to shutter detention centers.
Yu Wensheng, a human rights lawyer in Beijing, recounted being detained last year for 99 days for supporting pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and being questioned by the police more than 200 times.
“My hands were swollen and I felt so much pain that I didn’t want to live,” he said in the report. “The two police officers repeatedly yanked the handcuffs. I screamed every time they pulled them.”