Arcadia Foundation

A Chinese human rights activist has been camping out at Tokyo’s international airport since 4 November because Beijing has barred him from re-entering China.

Feng Zhenghu, a Shanghai-based activist, said in a phone conversation that he had been sleeping on a couch near the immigration checkpoint and surviving on food and water given to him by passing travellers.

His sister, Natsuki Suzuki, who lives in Japan and is married to a Japanese national, said today Feng arrived in Japan in April. Since then, he has tried unsuccessfully to return to China eight times.

Four times airlines prevented him from boarding, and four times – including his most recent attempt earlier this month – he got as far as Shanghai’s Pudong airport, but Chinese authorities refused him entry and sent him back to Tokyo, according to Suzuki.Fumio Ikeda, an immigration official, said Feng arrived from Shanghai on 4 November with a valid Chinese passport and a visa to enter Japan – but he has refused to leave Narita airport.

“I want to go back to China. I have no reason to stay in Japan,” Feng, 55, said by phone. He declined to say how long he would stay at the airport.

Ikeda said Japanese officials cannot force him to leave the airport.

Amnesty International has called Feng a prominent human rights defender in China. In 2001 he was sentenced to three years in prison for “illegal business activity“. Since his release in 2004 Feng has written critical pieces highlighting alleged malpractice by local governments and forced evictions, according to a 2009 report by the London-based rights group.

Zimbabwean police released the head of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Lovemore Matombo, and four other union officials arrested in Victoria Falls on Nov. 8, union Secretary-General Wellington Chibhebhe said by phone from Harare today.

“The police have embarrassed themselves through their actions because the ZCTU by law doesn’t have to apply for permission to hold meetings,” Chibhebhe said.

“It is heartbreaking and terrible that innocent people spent four nights in filthy police cells and were only freed when the courts intervened,” he said.

It’s come to this in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela: The president is pleading with people to save water by limiting their daily cleansing routine to a 3-minute “communist shower.”

Really.

This is the latest indication of how badly Mr. Chávez continues to mismanage the economy of energy-rich Venezuela, which should be one of the most prosperous nations in the world to judge from its vast hydrocarbon reserves.

The deterioration of basic services that has characterized his prolonged tenure at Miraflores Palace is becoming impossible to deny. Today, water rationing and power shortages have become recurring, frustrating features of daily life.

There is a subtle correlation between Mr. Chávez’s oversized regional ambitions and the gradual impoverishment of basic services. Many believe he has gone on an arms-buying spree around the world, purchasing $4 billion in weaponry from Russia alone in recent years, while at the same time neglecting maintenance of the infrastructure that provides water and electricity.

At the moment, the president seems content to vent his own frustration on the very people who are suffering from his misguided policies. “Some people sing in the bath for half an hour,” he told a recent cabinet session, broadcast live. “What kind of communism is that? Three minutes is more than enough!”

Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, expressed an opinion editorial on ‘black prisons‘ in China:

When 15-year-old Wang Xiaomei made the long trip from Gansu province to Beijing last year, she hoped to find justice for her family. Instead, she met with abuse.

First, Wang was abducted by plainclothes Gansu officials, who imprisoned her incommunicado for two months in a “black jail”—an illegal detention facility.

Two days before her September 13, 2008 release, Wang’s captors beat her so badly they knocked out one of her teeth. Wang’s victimizers have never been brought to justice.

Worse still, Wang’s experience—which stands in stark contrast to the Chinese government’s claims of fealty to the rule of law—is not unique. A new report released today, “An Alleyway in Hell: China’s Abusive ‘Black Jails’,” exposes the routine and severe human rights abuses perpetrated against detainees in these secret facilities.

Research shows that Wang is just one of estimated thousands of people abducted off the streets of Chinese cities and held incommunicado for weeks or months. Inside these unlawful, secret detention facilities detainees are beaten, sexually abused, deprived of food, sleep and medical care, and subject to theft, extortion and intimidation at the hands of their guards.

And, as Wang’s case shows, children aren’t spared the dangers and indignities of black jail detention. These facilities exist outside of China’s official prison system, and are often located in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals.

The former black jail detainees we interviewed were petitioners–people from mainly rural areas who come to Beijing and other cities in search of legal redress for violations including illegal land seizures and police torture. The petitioning system, which exists in parallel to formal judicial structures, is entirely legal, and explicitly permits people to take their grievances to the highest levels of government.

According to Kine, Black jails emerged in 2003 after the Chinese government abolished laws permitting the arbitrary detention of any “undesirables.” But that progress was undercut by the introduction at the local level of guidelines that limit local officials’ prospects for promotions or raises if petitioners from their areas carried on their efforts to find justice in larger cities.

“What might have been intended as an incentive to make local officials deal with local grievances became an incentive for those officials to keep petitioners off the streets and invest considerable resources in achieving that goal. Plainclothes thugs commonly known as retrievers, or jiefang renyuan, locate and abduct petitioners in Beijing and other cities for bounties as high as $250 per person. Operators of black jail facilities reap daily cash payments from local governments of up to $29 per detainee, helping to perpetuate black jail abuses“, she stated.

Rather than crack down on these facilities, the central Chinese government denies that they even exist. In an April 2009 Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference, a MOFA official responded to a foreign correspondent’s query about black jails by insisting, “Things like this do not exist in China.”

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