No Surprise at All

The UN finds that China's government tortures its people on a daily and regular basis? Say it isn't so.

Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, said police often resorted to torture in the early stages of detaining subjects as they came “under heavy pressure to produce confessions”. Techniques such as beatings and sleep deprivation by police and other security authorities focused on “breaking the will” of individuals, thus creating a “general culture of fear”, he said.

China needed to overhaul its legal system to ensure fair trials and see that detainees were not held under vaguely worded security laws, Mr Nowak said. He also accused the government of obstructing his investigations.

Mr Nowak’s findings, after an unprecedented two-week mission to China, also show poor legal protections for detainees, who often include ethnic minorities, political dissidents, religious activists and Falun Gong believers.

Mr Nowak said that while China’s government had shown its commitment to reducing instances of torture, it must make structural changes to its detention and legal system. He said Beijing had to “bring criminal law and criminal procedures in line with international standards”.

And yet, the UN wanted to give countries like China control over the Internet. That was such a good idea. Put the most repressive countries in charge of the thing they fear the most - the free flow of information that would undermine their authoritarian and totalitarian governments.