View previous stories
	China court jails anti-graft activists for protests against corruption by Agence France Presse (AFP)   17 April 2014   A Chinese court on Friday sentenced four anti-corruption protestors to between two and three-and-a-half years in jail over their role in small-scale demonstrations.   The decision is being viewed as a further crackdown on rights activists.   The four are associated with the New Citizens Movement, a loose network whose members held peaceful protests in Beijing last year.   The activists carried banners calling for officials to disclose their assets as a measure against graft.   They are sentenced for "gathering a crowd to disturb public order", Beijing"s Haidian district court said on an official microblog. The charge has often been used to detain protesters.   Ding Jiaxi, a well-known human rights lawyer, is jailed for three-and-a-half years.   Veteran activist Zhao Changqing is jailed for two-and-a-half years, the court said. Fellow protesters Zhang Baocheng and Li Wei have both received two-year sentences.   The verdicts come a week after Beijing"s high court upheld a four-year sentence for Xu Zhiyong, a founder of the movement.   Ten New Citizens Movement members have faced trial this year.   "The ruling is a warning and a threat," Ge Yongxi, a lawyer for Zhang Baocheng told AFP.   He says his client complied with police requests to hand over his banners when the protests, involving a handful of activists, were curtailed.   "We think he"s completely innocent, there is no legal basis for the court"s ruling, and the punishment is too heavy," Ge said. Mr Ge said his client will appeal.   The activists are jailed "because they asked for officials to expose their assets," said Zhang Keke, a lawyer for Ding.   Mr Zhang says that the court has violated regulations by not granting Ding an opportunity to appeal the verdict after it was read out.   Police have also detained six activists who travelled to Beijing to stand outside the court on Friday, fellow campaigner Wang Aizhong told AFP by phone.   Five diplomats attempting to attend the court proceedings have been barred from doing so, said Raphael Droszewski, a first secretary at the European Union"s delegation to China.   He told AFP that the EU is concerned about the verdicts.   Mr Droszewski says citizens are being "prosecuted for peacefully expressing their views".   Security has been heavy outside New Citizens Movement trials, with media barred from standing near courthouses.   Police has sometimes manhandled journalists and diplomats.   China"s ruling Communist Party has repeatedly vowed to combat rampant official corruption.   President Xi Jinping has threatened to target high-ranking "tigers" and low-level "flies" in the face of public anger over the issue.   But the party has cracked down on activists pursuing the same goals, viewing independently organised anti-corruption protests as a challenge to its tight grip on power. New Citizens Movement members say the wave of arrests, which began last year, have heavily curbed their activities. The group has pushed for legal and educational reforms. Visit the related web page
	Amartya Sen: Poverty and the Tolerance of the Intolerable by Jonathan Derbyshire LSE, Prospect Magazine & agencies   Last night, Professor Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, delivered the Prospect/Joseph Rowntree Foundation anti-poverty lecture in front of an audience of several hundred people at the London School of Economics, with many more watching the live stream online and following #LSEpoverty on Twitter.   Sen took as his title “Poverty and the Tolerance of the Intolerable”. No country in the world, he declared, is “free from poverty”, though in India, the country of his birth, where there is a “massive disparity between the privileged and the rest”, extreme deprivation is particularly deeply entrenched.   India, he said, is an example of a country with a large middle class which is able to tolerate, with something approaching equanimity, the serious poverty in its midst.   Although the situation in India is extreme—Sen referred to the “special nature of the neglect of its poor” —there is no reason for those of us elsewhere in the world, especially the developed world, to be complacent.   “Blaming the victims” of poverty, he observed, is as common today as it was in the era of the Poor Law.   How is it, Sen asked, that a society is able to avert its gaze from, or else accept as a “fact of life”, the kind of deprivation that robs human beings of the very “social qualities” that make us the sort of creatures we are? To illustrate the damage that poverty does, Sen recalled his own experience, as a child of almost ten, of the Bengal famine of 1943.   He remembered giving a banana to a malnourished woman and child. The woman burst into tears as she instinctively started to feed herself before offering the fruit to her child. “We are no longer human beings,” she cried.   Tolerance of destitution on a mass scale is a phenomenon that “demands explanation”, though none of the frequently canvassed explanations that Sen went on to consider is, he thought, at all satisfactory.   In the first of these explanations, tolerance of the intolerable is said simply to be a matter of “ignorance”. In the second, it is asserted that poverty is ineluctable and irremediable; as the Gospel According to St Matthew puts it, “Ye have the poor always with you.”   Proponents of this explanation, said Sen, tend to present themselves as hard-nosed “realists” about poverty. The third explanation turns on an account of human nature: human beings are self-centred creatures who do not, and perhaps should not, care about the fate of others.   This argument invokes a “moral contingency that makes poverty tolerable to those of us who do not suffer from it”. In other words, there is no duty on the non-poor to relieve the suffering of the poor.   Examining the first explanation, Sen suggested that, in the Indian case at least, tolerance of the intolerable was a consequence not so much of ignorance as of skewed priorites. The interests of India’s growing middle class have a “huge hold”, he argued, over the priorities of the national media. The result is a “crowding out of discussion of the nature, extent and remediability” of poverty and deprivation.   What about the ineluctability argument and the belief that the poor will always be with us? These are hard to defend on purely empirical grounds, Sen said. After all, there have been many successful large-scale attempts elsewhere in the world to significantly reduce poverty—not least in China, with which India compares unfavourably.   And as for the final explanation—the claim that there is a “moral disconnect” between the privileged and the destitute—Sen noted that it is often wrongly attributed to the putative father of free-market economics, Adam Smith. Smith, he reminded the audience, was the author not only of The Wealth of Nations, but also of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the first sentence of which reads as follows: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”   If, as Sen insisted, none of these arguments is sufficient, on its own, to explain tolerance of extreme poverty, how are we to account for their enduring appeal? (They form part, he said, of a hard-to-dislodge “theory of poverty”.) The blame, he concluded, must lie with “fallacious reasoning”. And remedying the prevalence of that requires renovating the “practice of democracy” itself.   * Listen to a podcast of Amartya Sen’s lecture on “Poverty and the Tolerance of the Intolerable”: http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publiclecturesandevents/20130122_1830_povertyToleranceIntolerable.mp3
	View more stories