Human rights groups yesterday accused China of using prisoners as political pawns and warned that the release of Uighur dissident Rebiya Kadeer did not mean Beijing has improved its rights record.
"We are extremely concerned that the release of Rebiya Kadeer will be cited as evidence of improvements in human rights as the European Union debates lifting its arms embargo on China," said Amnesty International's deputy director for Asia, Catherine Baber.
"Rebiya Kadeer's release does not alter the laws and practices regularly used by the Chinese authorities to detain and imprison individuals who peacefully exercise their rights to freedom of expression, association and other fundamental human rights."
Amnesty said Kadeer should never have been jailed in the first place and accused China of playing "hostage politics."
Kadeer, 58, was freed Thursday as China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing pressed EU leaders in Brussels to remove an arms ban that has been in place since Beijing's bloody crushing of students and democracy campaigners in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The EU has called for evidence of improvements in China's human rights record before it lifts the ban.
Her freedom also coincided with the US deciding not to introduce a resolution critical of China at this year's UN human rights commission meeting, citing Kadeer's release as a sign of "progress" by Beijing.
"Letting her go now is yet another instance of China's revolving door policy of releasing a few prominent political prisoners before important international events to head off criticism," said Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch.
"To suggest, as the US did, that China has progressed in its respect for human rights so much that it deserves to escape even a discussion at the Commission on Human Rights is inexplicable and unfortunate," Adams said.
Kadeer, a leading member of China's Uighur ethnic group in the largely Muslim western autonomous region of Xinjiang, was arrested in August 1999 while on her way to meet a US congressional staff delegation. She was charged with "providing secret information to foreigners" and jailed for eight years after a secret trial.
"Basically what they appeared most concerned with was getting her out before the visit of Condoleezza Rice," John Kamm, head of rights group Duihua Foundation who helped secure the release, said.
World Uighur Youth Congress, a separatist organization based in Munich, warned Kadeer's release could worsen the plight of others in Xinjiang.
Rebiya Kadeer, a top campaigner for the rights of China's Muslim Uighur minority, has vowed to fight for her people's freedom as she arrived in the US following her release from nearly six years of detention in Beijing.
"I will keep on fighting for my people until my last breath," the 58-year-old mother of 11 told scores of exiled Uighurs and human rights advocates at the Washington National Airport in an emotional welcome.
Looking exhausted after her 36-hour journey from Beijing en route to Chicago, Kadeer said in between sobs that her prison term was "her lowest point" in her life but "I now know that justice exists and I hope that everyone like me will be free one day, released from their prison cells and be happy with their loves ones," Kadeer said, hugging her eldest daughter, Akida Rouzi.
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