A rights group said yesterday that a teacher who posted pictures online of schools that collapsed when a massive earthquake hit Sichuan Province in May has been sent to a labor camp for one year.
Human Rights in China said Liu Shaokun (劉紹坤) had been ordered to serve a year of “reeducation through labor,” a system that sidesteps the need for a criminal trial or a formal charge.
It said in a statement that Liu, a teacher at Guanghan Middle School in Deyang City, was detained on June 25 for “disseminating rumors and destroying social order.” His wife was told one week ago that he had been sent to a labor camp.
The May 12 earthquake killed nearly 70,000 people, including thousands of children who died when their shoddily built schools collapsed. The issue has become a sensitive political issue, with parents of dead children staging protests demanding investigations. In recent weeks they have also been subjected to intimidation and financial inducements to silence them.
“Instead of investigating and pursuing accountability for shoddy and dangerous school buildings, the authorities are resorting to reeducation through labor to silence and lock up concerned citizens like teacher Liu Shaokun and others,” Human Rights in China executive director Sharon Hom said.
The group said Liu’s family has not been able to see him since he was detained.
An official at the Communist Party’s propaganda office in Guanghan said he had not heard of the case.
He would give only his surname Tang as is common among Chinese bureaucrats.
Another official with the general office of the Guanghan school said Liu had been working there since 2002.
“He was detained late last month by people from national security bureau for deliberately inciting families of victims to petition and disseminating anti-government rumors. They searched his home and found evidence,” said the official, who refused to give his name.
The reeducation through labor system has been widely criticized by the UN, the EU and other organizations, which say it should be abolished as part of Beijing’s acceptance of international legal norms.
Meanwhile, the finance ministry has earmarked 1.34 billion yuan (US$196 million) to repair and rebuild schools in badly hit areas in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces, the Beijing Times reported yesterday.
It has also given out 980 million yuan for schools to buy teaching equipment and facilities, it said.
The money is part of a 70-billion-yuan budget the central government set aside this year for reconstruction after the earthquake.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS