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	Fears for Chinese detained in illegal jails by Human Rights Watch & news agencies   Nov 13, 2009   Fears for Chinese detained in illegal jails, by John Garnaut.   Thousands of Chinese people are abducted and detained in illegal "black jails" each year for trying to lodge complaints against officials, a report says.   The complainants, known as "petitioners" in China, are typically detained while trying to submit grievances to government offices that are legally established to hear their complaints, says the Human Rights Watch report, An Alleyway in Hell.   Conditions in the black jails are "invariably harsh", with detainees subjected to food and sleep deprivation, appalling sanitary conditions, beatings and worse.   "They threatened that if I escaped, they"d take me to the male prison and let the inmates take turns raping me," said a woman, 42, in Sichuan province, who was one of 38 illegally detained petitioners interviewed by Human Rights Watch.   Officials at various tiers of government have created this network of extra-judicial abductions and detentions as a way of improving their own work performance appraisals, as merit points are deducted when complaints are made against them.   Huge numbers of uniformed and plain-clothes police, and their hired thugs, are sent out to intercept petitioners before they reach the Government"s petitions office.   The grim abduction and detention system was outsourced to private operators and driven underground in 2003, when Beijing ruled that local governments could no longer maintain such facilities.   Security forces at all tiers of government are complicit in the system, refusing to assist victims and frequently assisting their captors, says the report, to be released today. It says a series of recent central government regulations and edicts that require local officials to resolve problems locally are likely to make the problems worse.   "Chinese legal scholars and academics who have researched black jails say their emergence since 2003 constitutes one of the most serious and widespread uses of extra-legal detention in China"s recent history," says the report.   "A Chinese legal expert who has extensively researched the issue of black jails estimates that the number of incidents in which citizens are illegally detained each year in black jails in Beijing alone is as high as 10,000, though that number includes individuals who are detained on multiple occasions," it says.   Despite dozens of cases closely documented by reporters and Chinese lawyers, in June the Chinese Government told the United Nations Human Rights Council: "There are no black jails in the country."   Local judicial systems are usually impotent to deal with complaints made against local officials, as they are run by those same officials.   Complainants typically try to petition higher tiers of government so they can deal with officials who are not involved with their immediate problems.   But Professor Yu Jianrong, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says that only one out of 632 petitioners that he surveyed in Beijing had their complaints successfully resolved.   "Every day I could only sleep three hours and they would at any time wake me in order that I couldn"t run away," said a woman, 46, from Jiangsu province. "I was hungry every day, but couldn"t get enough to eat. The second time I was detained for 37 days … I lost 20 kilograms."   * Visit the link below to access the report. Visit the related web page
	Almost one in 10 disabled people in the UK victim of a hate crime by The Guardian / UK   Nov 2009   Almost one in 10 disabled people in the UK have been the victim of a hate crime, according to a leading disability charity. For the first time, the 2009 version of an annual survey carried out by Leonard Cheshire Disability asked respondents whether they had faced a crime which they felt was motivated by their disability, with 9% saying they had.   "Even without a comparison for previous years, this is a shocking figure," said Eleanor Gore, from Leonard Cheshire, who compiled the review. "It"s often hard to know how big a problem disability hate crime is as it tends to be very under-reported, and sometimes police and councils don"t recognise it properly."   The charity said it had included the question after high-profile incidents in which disabled people had been targeted, notably the case of Fiona Pilkington and her 18-year-old daughter, Francecca.   In September, an inquest jury criticised police and a council in Leicestershire for failing to help Pilkington after her family suffered years of abuse from gangs of youths. Pilkington killed herself and Francecca by setting the family car alight in a layby near their home.   The inquest heard that police and council antisocial behaviour officers failed to recognise the family"s torment as a potential hate crime, and did not know that Pilkington was caring for a severely disabled daughter and a son with more moderate learning difficulties, even though Pilkington rang police more than 30 times over the course of a decade.   The Disability Review, based on responses from 1,253 people, found 12% of disabled people had been the victims of a crime, although not necessarily a hate-motivated offence, over the last year.   It recorded evidence of increased financial hardship and discrimination faced by disabled people, 42% said they were finding it hard to live on their income.   A similar percentage believed they had been turned down for a job because of their disability, a rise of seven percentage points from 2008, while more than half felt they had been discriminated against in a place of work. Visit the related web page
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