By Jerome A. Cohen
Human Rights Watch’s Sophie Richardson just wrote an article, Chinese Authorities Torment Activist’s Dying Mother. It’s a representative example of the kinds of informal but harsh punishments to which countless people are invisibly subjected in China, without a shred of legal pretense. One can only speculate about the numbers of victims of this lawlessness, usually inflicted by the secret police or their thugs.
When the PRC National People’s Congress meets in a few weeks, in their annual reports the President of the Supreme People’s Court and the Procurator General will each rattle off endless statistics about the millions of cases their respective institutions have formally processed. Yet no one will report on the millions of people who suffer daily humiliating, unregulated restrictions on their personal freedoms. The Ministry of Public Security should certainly report on this important aspect of its massive activity, but it also does nor report on its monitoring and inhibition of even the Party elite, not to mention ordinary citizens. At least this massive task provides jobs for many university graduates who might otherwise face employment problems!