HOC SAYS CHINA IS PLYING DEATH ON DEATH IN SARS EPIDEMIC

“The decision of the Chinese authorities is a ominous one and proves how the death penalty, and repressive policies in China and elsewhere in the world, are just an expression of the failure of a serious policy of prevention,” Hands Off Cain General Secretary Sergio D’Elia declared in a press statement.
“When regimes do not manage to contain crime and prevent epidemic outbreaks, they turn to repression and the so-called methods of deterrence. “The decision to fall back on the death penalty to repress death by a virus must bring home to the international community that the real threat in China is not the SARS virus, but the dictatorship that smothers freedom and transparency and does not generate anything but death, whether the fatal cause is a virus or a decision of the state.
“If the Chinese authorities are taking the same approach to the SARS epidemic that it takes to the death penalty, and that is imposing state secret limitations on the real numbers, then the spread of SARS in China may be much worse than it seems to be according to official government data.”
Statistics compiled by HOC for 2002 list at least 3,138 executions in China last year, equal to 77% of the total executions worldwide. But the real figures are almost certainly much higher. Secret Communist Party documents that came to light last year said 15,000 executions were carried out every year from 1998 to 2001.