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China Moves from Bullets to Mobile Execution Vans to Improve International Image

TORONTO, November 3, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - As part of its attempts to streamline the enormous number of executions and improve its public image as a human rights violator, China’s communist government has introduced mobile killing vans to execute condemned prisoners.

Recent visits from United Nations Human Rights investigators and a booming economy seeking foreign trade have prompted the Chinese government to seek methods of execution less offensive to Western sensibilities. A law was passed recently that changed the most common method of execution from the traditional bullet to the back of the head to lethal injection.

The execution vans are converted 24-seater buses in which those condemned are strapped to a metal table in a windowless execution chamber. A police officer then administers an automated lethal injection that works in 30 to 60 seconds. Until recently, the most common method of execution, the bullet to the back of the head, was often administered in public, sometimes in a stadium.

Intermediate Courts of the southern province of Yunnan were issued with 18 new execution vans on February 28.

Law reform was high on the agenda when Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights visited the country in September. Western human rights monitors estimate that the Chinese execute about 15,000 persons a year - more than the rest of the world's judicial executions combined. In addition, the role of defence lawyers is seriously underdeveloped and they have little impact in court cases. When appeals against the death penalty are rejected, the sentence is carried out immediately, sometimes within hours.

In addition to the enormous number of death sentences, the Chinese legal system makes use of the full array of traditional communist methods of suppression of political dissent. This includes the use of police-run “mental hospitals,” and “re-education through labour camps” where the few who have been released report regular use of torture.

Political dissident Wang Wanxing was held in a mental asylum for the criminally insane for 13 years until his release in August. Wang told Human Rights Watch that while incarcerated in the Beijing Public Security Bureau's Ankang Hospital for the Custody and Treatment of Mentally Ill Offenders he witnessed the regular use of electric shock acupuncture to torture inmates. Wang was “diagnosed” with “political monomania” for which he was administered chlorpromazine, a powerful antipsychotic drug, three times daily.

After his release, shortly before Louise Arbour’s visit, Wang went into exile in Germany where his family had been living for several years as political refugees. Wang was the first ever to have been released out of an estimated 3000 political prisoners held in the notorious Ankang system.

International trade relations are often cited as a motive for the Chinese to clean up their image as human rights violators.

Canada’s relations with China have been especially friendly recently with a state visit from Chinese president Hu Jintao in early September. Among the politicians who met with him was Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who has expressed his desire for closer business and cultural and personal relations with the communist country.

This week, McGuinty said he wanted the government of Canada to “start thinking about a long-term relationship that involves a continuing effort, and look for ways to establish some kind of relationship or connection that has [sic] marks you as different from others.”

McGuinty and 125 business and academic representatives depart Friday for a 12-day trade mission and photo-op trip to China.

Political Prisoner Exposes Brutality in Police-Run Mental Hospital: Human Rights Watch
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/01/china11957.htm

Hu Jintao Meets with Premier of Ontario Province and Ministers of the Canadian Federal Government: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China
http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t212597.htm

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