CHINA. UN TORTURE OFFICIAL URGES CHINA TO CHANGE SYSTEM

UN torture investigator Manfred Nowak who made a landmark visit to China in 2005 called for sweeping changes in its police and court systems to reduce the widespread use of torture.
The report by Nowak also urged Beijing to stop executing people for economic and nonviolent crimes and to abolish vague state security laws used against dissidents. It called for the release of people jailed for peaceful exercise of free speech or religion. China's government angrily rejected the report as incorrect and insisted that it forbids torture.
Nowak's report, dated March 10 and posted on the UNHCHR Web site, said torture of crime suspects was widespread due to the Chinese legal system's heavy reliance on confessions. Nowak recommended that videotaping of police interrogations should become routine, and said judges should ask suspects if they have been mistreated.
The communist government in December rejected Nowak's conclusion that torture was widespread. The government outlawed torture in 1996 and said it punished police or others who mistreated detainees.
In a highly publicized case in April 2005, a man who said he was tortured into making a false confession that he killed his wife was freed after 11 years in prison when the wife reappeared alive and said she had left her husband to be with another man.
That case prompted an unusual public discussion in state media over police use of torture. News reports quoted Chinese legal experts as saying such "forced confessions" were common. Nowak was allowed to meet 30 detainees - including prison inmates and others awaiting trial - in Beijing, Tibet and the northwestern Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.
Detainees cited in his report say they were kicked, beaten, shocked with electric batons on their feet and genitals or held in solitary confinement for up to 60 days. Nowak's report said that even though he was allowed to interview detainees without officials listening in, he found a "palpable level of fear and self-censorship" among them.
The report also called on China's Supreme Court to publish nationwide death penalty statistics.