Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

While Iran has started to free some of its political prisoners, China does the opposite by detaining two prominent rights activists who were en route to Geneva ahead of a U.N. review of Beijing’s rights record. Beijing-based activist Cao Shunli was stopped at Beijing’s airport on 14 September and questioned by state security police, the overseas-based China Human Rights Defenders [CHRD] said in an emailed statement. On the same day, Guangdong rights activist Chen Jianfang was also intercepted at Guangzhou’s  International Airport.The activists, who have been incommunicado since, had been en-route to Geneva to attend a training course at the invitation of a Geneva-based rights group ahead of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review of China on 22 October. Chen, a farmer-turned-petitioner who has been repeatedly detained in illegal “black jails” and who served a 15-month term in labor camp in March 2010, said she was threatened with violence by airport police, who also tore up her plane ticket. Both women had been active in transparency campaigns around the U.N. review process, sending information requests, suing the foreign ministry, and staging demonstrations outside its gates in a bid to be included in China’s submission to the U.N. “In recent weeks, police in several Chinese cities have interrogated other activists and lawyers about the same training program and warned them about serious consequences,” CHRD said.

(Reported by Wei Ling for RFA’s Cantonese Service, and by Xin Yu for the Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie).

via RFA’s China Detains Activists Over UN Campaign.

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