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	Vast majority of detained lawyers are defending the basic rights of Chinese citizens by United Nations Special Rapporteurs Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights China   UN experts urge China to release lawyer Jiang Tianyong currently on trial for subversion.   A group of United Nations human rights experts has called on the Government of China to immediately release the prominent lawyer and human rights defender Jiang Tianyong, who is on trial for inciting subversion of the State’s power.   The experts’ appeal comes as Mr. Jiang awaits the Court’s verdict after his televised “confession” on 22 August, to seeking to overthrow China’s political system, which the experts described as “a worrying sign of China’s disregard for due process and the rule of law”.   “We urge the Chinese authorities to uphold the rule of law by respecting Mr. Jiang’s rights to a fair trial and to carry out his work as a professional lawyer and human rights defender,” they said.   Mr. Jiang, who was allegedly disappeared on 21 November 2016, has been detained and under surveillance at an unknown location for more than nine months, without access to his family or a lawyer of his own choosing. There are concerns that he, along with other lawyers and human rights defenders in detention, may have been subjected to torture and ill-treatment.   “Given the reported conditions of his detention and earlier cases of a similar nature highlighting an ongoing worrying trend, we are gravely concerned that his confession may have been coerced by the use of torture, in contravention of the Chinese Criminal Procedures Law and international human rights standards, as reiterated by the Committee Against Torture in 2015,” the experts noted.   They also stressed the fact that the proceedings were not freely open to all interested members of the public to attend, while Mr. Jiang’s “confession” was broadcast on television and the Court’s social media; and that Mr. Jiang’s lawyer was dismissed by the authorities and had no access to him since his disappearance. “These factors clearly point to the serious shortcomings in guaranteeing a fair and impartial trial in accordance with international standards,” they said.   “The overbroad scope of the charges also seems to be a glaring breach of human rights in itself,” the experts underscored.   “Mr. Jiang’s ‘crime’ apparently included communications with foreign entities, which potentially include the UN human rights mechanisms, giving interviews to foreign media, and receiving training on the Western constitutional system, all of which have been carried out in the course of his work as a lawyer,” they said.   The rights experts noted that “the suppression and criminalization of such communications and activities constitute a serious violation of the fundamental right to freely seek, receive and impart information about human rights, and can only be characterized as an effort to root out voices that are considered to interfere with the Communist Party’s rule.”   The group of experts also expressed concern about the fact that Mr. Jiang had been charged with having fabricated allegations of torture committed against another lawyer in detention, who was arrested in the so-called 709 crackdown.   “By portraying Mr. Jiang as a lying criminal, the authorities seem to have conveniently sidestepped the serious allegations of torture, perpetuating a circle of impunity,” the experts concluded. http://bit.ly/2h2OD8T   * The experts: Mr. Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights; Mr. Michel Forst, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Mr. David Kaye, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right freedom of opinion and expression; and Mr. José Antonio Guevara Bermúdez, Chair-Rappourteur of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.   May 2017   The vast majority of detained lawyers are defending the basic rights of Chinese citizens, reports Ravina Shamdasani from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.   We are deeply troubled that on Wednesday 3 May, defence lawyer Chen Jiangang and his family were reportedly taken by police while they were travelling in Yunnan province in the southwest of China. This latest event takes place in the context of an ongoing crackdown against Chinese lawyers and other human rights defenders. There has reportedly been no official communication of the reasons Chen was taken away. His wife and two children were subsequently released but Chen’s whereabouts remain unclear.   Chen was the defence lawyer chosen by Xie Yang, a lawyer who has been in detention since July 2015. Xie was only officially charged in January 2016 for inciting subversion of state power and disrupting court order. The trial was due to begin last week, but did not.   In March this year, Chen reported that his client and other detained lawyers, including Wang Quanzhang, Jiang Tianyong and Li Heping, were subjected to ill-treatment and torture in custody. Li Heping, who spent 21 months in incommunicado detention, was secretly sentenced on 25 April to three years in prison, with the possibility of a four-year suspension should he choose not to appeal. He remains in custody and pressure continues to be exerted on his family.   Prior to being reportedly taken by police last Wednesday, Chen had, in a video message, expressed concerns that he too may "lose his freedom" and that he may be coerced into self-incrimination.   Despite numerous calls by a number of UN human rights bodies, including Special Rappporteurs, the UN Committee against Torture and by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, we are dismayed by this continuing pattern of harassment of lawyers, through continued detention, without full due process guarantees and with alleged exposure to ill-treatment and coercion into self-incrimination. We also ask the Chinese authorities to halt the harassment against their relatives.   The vast majority of detained lawyers were defending the basic rights of Chinese citizens, mostly economic, social and cultural rights.   We urge the Chinese government to abide by its international human rights obligations, to ensure due process and fair trials, and to release without delay those being held for exercising their fundamental human rights or for defending the exercise of such rights by others. http://bit.ly/2r6EFa1 http://bit.ly/2wZ13Go   * Access the latest news from UN Human Rights Mechanisms (Special Rapporteurs and Experts): http://bit.ly/2w5fHKF http://bit.ly/2eSmUdZ Visit the related web page
	Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse delivers final report by Justice Peter McClellan, Justice Jennifer Coate USA, Chile, Australia   Aug. 2018   Priests in Pennsylvania have sexually abused hundreds of children since the 1950s. (AP)   More than 1,000 children - and possibly many more - were molested by hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses and senior church officials took steps to cover it up, according to a landmark grand jury report.   The grand jury said it believed the "real number" of abused children might be "in the thousands" since some records were lost and victims were afraid to come forward.   The report said more than 300 clergy committed the abuse over decades, beginning in the mid-1950s.   Pennsylvania Attorney-General Josh Shapiro said the two-year probe found a systematic cover-up by senior church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican.   "The cover-up was sophisticated.. And all the while, shockingly, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up," he said. "These documents, from the dioceses'' own ''secret archives,'' formed the backbone of this investigation."   The grand jury scrutinised abuse allegations in dioceses that minister to more than half the state''s 3.2 million Catholics.   Its report echoed the findings of many earlier church investigations around the country in its description of widespread sexual abuse by clergy and church officials'' concealment of it. Most of the victims were boys, but girls were abused, too, the report said.   "Church officials routinely and purposefully described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate conduct.. It was none of those things. It was child sexual abuse, including rape," Mr Shapiro said.   The panel concluded a succession of Catholic bishops and other diocesan leaders tried to shield the church from bad publicity and financial liability by covering up abuse, failing to report accused clergy to police and discouraging victims from going to law enforcement.   Yet, the grand jury''s work won''t result in justice for the vast majority of those who say they were molested by priests as children.   While the probe yielded charges against two clergymen — including a priest who has since pleaded guilty, and another who allegedly forced his accuser to say confession after each sex assault — the other priests identified as perpetrators are either dead or will avoid arrest because their alleged crimes are too old to prosecute under state law.   "We are sick over all the crimes that will go unpunished and uncompensated," the grand jury said.   May 2018   Chile’s bishops have offered to resign en masse over a sexual abuse and cover-up scandal that has been highly damaging to the Catholic church.   Thirty-one serving bishops and three retired bishops signed a letter of resignation on Friday. “We have put our positions in the hands of the Holy Father and will leave it to him to decide freely for each of us,” they said. “We want to ask forgiveness for the pain caused to the victims, to the pope, to God’s people and to our country for the serious errors and omissions we have committed.”   There was no immediate indication of whether the pope would accept their resignations.   The bishops’ move came after Francis said the Chilean church hierarchy was collectively responsible for “grave defects” in handling sexual abuse cases and the resulting loss of credibility suffered by the church.   He accused them of destroying evidence of sexual crimes, putting pressure on investigators to downplay abuse accusations and showing “grave negligence” in protecting children from paedophile priests.   “No one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others,” Francis said in a letter to the bishops.   Francis summoned the bishops to a three-day emergency summit in Rome after he was forced to admit he had made “grave errors in judgment” in the case of Juan Barros, a bishop who had been accused of covering up alleged abuse by a Chilean priest, Fernando Karadima, in the 1980s and 90s. The Chilean church has been rocked by the allegations of abuse by Karadima and others, and by claims that senior figures knew about it what was going on.   Now 87 and living in a nursing home in Chile, Karadima has always denied the allegations. Barros has said he was unaware of any wrongdoing.   Francis defended Barros during a visit to Chile in January, accusing Karadima’s accusers of slander, in remarks that shocked Chileans and others around the world. “There is not one piece of evidence against [Barros]. It is calumny,” he said.   Francis’s comments were seen as highly regrettable, compounding a widespread view that the vatican had failed to take a robust stance on the issue of clerical sexual abuse.   The Vatican later sent two expert on sexual crimes to investigate claims of widespread abuse and cover-up in Chile. They delivered a 2,300-page report.   In a 10-page letter commenting on the report, which was handed to the Chilean bishops at the start of the summit, the pope said the church authorities had minimised “the absolute gravity of their [priests’] criminal acts, attributing to them mere weakness or moral lapses.”   Priests accused of abuse were moved but “were then welcomed into other dioceses, in an obviously imprudent way, and given … jobs that gave them daily contact with minors.”   Francis said he was “perplexed and ashamed” by the report’s evidence that pressure was put on church officials tasked with investigating sexual crimes, “including the destruction of compromising documents on the part of those in charge of ecclesiastic archives”.   He said: “The problems inside the church community can’t be solved just by dealing with individual cases and reducing them to the removal of people, though this – and I say so clearly – has to be done.   “But it’s not enough, we have to go beyond that. It would be irresponsible on our part to not look deeply into the roots and the structures that allowed these concrete events to occur and perpetuate.”   In an attempt to limit the damage caused by his comments in January defending Barros, the pope met and apologised to three Chilean abuse survivors at his Vatican residence, the Casa Santa Marta. http://bit.ly/2LaPvXy   http://www.dw.com/en/pope-expresses-shame-to-chileans-over-sexual-abuse/a-44027364   Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse delivers final report - Justice Peter McClellan, Justice Jennifer Coate.   ''The allegations that have come to light recently about child sexual abuse have been heartbreaking. These are insidious, evil acts to which no child should be subject. The individuals concerned deserve the most thorough of investigations into the wrongs that have been committed against them. They deserve to have their voices heard and their claims investigated. I believe a Royal Commission is the best way to do this''. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard when announcing the Royal Commission.   The sexual abuse of a child is a terrible crime. It is the greatest of personal violations. It is perpetrated against the most vulnerable in our community. It is a fundamental breach of the trust that children are entitled to place in adults. It is one of the most traumatic and potentially damaging experiences and can have lifelong adverse consequences.   Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian institutions. We will never know the true number. Whatever the number, it is a national tragedy, perpetrated over generations within many of our most trusted institutions.   The sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost every type of institution where children reside or attend for educational, recreational, sporting, religious or cultural activities.   Some institutions have had multiple abusers who sexually abused multiple children. It is not a case of a few ‘rotten apples’. Society’s major institutions have seriously failed. In many cases those failings have been exacerbated by a manifestly inadequate response to the abused person.   The problems have been so widespread, and the nature of the abuse so heinous, that it is difficult to comprehend.   This report details our findings and recommendations. It also contains our conclusions in respect of the institutions we examined in our public hearings. It should not be assumed that many other institutions have not had significant problems. Many have. More than 4,000 individual institutions were reported to us as places where abuse has occurred.   While some of these institutions have ceased to operate, others continue to actively engage with children and young people. Our resources and the risk of prejudicing criminal investigations or prosecutions meant that we could not publicly examine or report on many institutions in which survivors told us they had been sexually abused.   The failure to protect children has not been limited to institutions providing services to children. Some of our most important state instrumentalities have also failed. Police often refused to believe children. They refused to investigate their complaints. Many children who had attempted to escape were returned to unsafe institutions by police. Child protection agencies did not listen to children. They did not act on concerns, leaving them in situations of great danger.   Our criminal justice system has created many barriers to the successful prosecution of alleged perpetrators. Investigation processes were inadequate and criminal procedures were inappropriate. Our civil law placed impossible barriers on survivors bringing claims against individual abusers and institutions.   It is remarkable that in so many cases the perpetrator of abuse was a member of an organisation that professed to care for children. Just as remarkable was the failure of the leaders of that institution to respond with compassion to the survivor.   Many institutions we examined did not have a culture where the best interests of children were the priority. Some leaders did not take responsibility for their institution’s failure to protect children. Some leaders felt their primary responsibility was to protect the institution’s reputation, and the accused person. Many did not recognise the impact this had on children.   Poor practices, inadequate governance structures, failures to record and report complaints, or understating the seriousness of complaints, have been frequent.   Many children have been sexually abused in religious institutions in Australia. Based on the information before us, the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions.   In many religious institutions, the power afforded to people in religious ministry and the misplaced trust of parents combined with aspects of the institutional culture, practices and attitudes to create risks for children.   Alleged perpetrators often continued to have access to children even when religious leaders knew they posed a danger. We heard that alleged perpetrators were often transferred to other locations but they were rarely reported to police.   The failure to understand that the sexual abuse of a child was a crime with profound impacts for the victim, and not a mere moral failure capable of correction by contrition and penance (a view expressed in the past by a number of religious leaders) is almost incomprehensible.   It can only be explained by acknowledging that the culture of some religious institutions prioritised alleged perpetrators and institutional reputations over the safety of children.   In past generations, the trust placed by some parents and the broader community in institutions and their members meant that abusers were enabled and children’s interests were compromised.   The prevailing culture that ‘children should be seen and not heard’ resonated throughout residential care, religious institutions, schools and some family homes. Their complaints of abuse ignored and rejected, many children lost faith in adults and society’s institutions.   While we heard of child sexual abuse in institutions that spanned the past 90 years, it is not a problem from the past. Child sexual abuse in institutions continues today. We were told of many cases of abuse that occurred in the last 10 to 15 years in a range of institutions, including schools, religious institutions, foster and kinship care, respite care, health and allied services, performing arts institutions, childcare centres and youth groups.   We heard in private sessions from children as young as seven years of age who had been recently abused. In some of our case studies into schools, the abuse was so recent that the abused children were still attending school. We learned that cultures and practices in some institutions allowed this more recent abuse to occur and continue.   The Commissioners have listened to the personal stories of over 8,000 survivors and read over 1,000 written accounts. Most are stories of personal trauma and many are of personal tragedy.   It is impossible not to share the anger many survivors have felt when we understand that they were so deeply betrayed by people they were entitled to trust.   Many speak of a childhood lost, innocence stolen, and a life journey irreparably and adversely changed.   Protecting children and promoting their safety is everyone’s business. It is a national priority that requires a national response.   Everyone – the Australian Government and state and territory governments, sectors and institutions, communities, families and individuals – has a role to play in protecting children in institutions.   Valuing children and their rights is the foundation of all child safe institutions. Improving child safe approaches in institutions will reduce the risk of sexual abuse. The best interests of children must be the primary consideration.   There may be leaders and members of some institutions who resent the intrusion of the Royal Commission into their affairs. However, if the problems we have identified are to be adequately addressed, changes must be made to the culture, structure and governance practices of institutions.   A failure to act will inevitably lead to the continuing sexual abuse of children, some of whom will suffer lifelong harm. That harm can be devastating for the individual. It also has a cost to the entire Australian community. Many survivors will require help with health, particularly mental health, housing and other public services.   * Access the final report of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse via the link below. Visit the related web page
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