Reports

This 75-page report draws on research in heavily lead-contaminated villages in Henan, Yunnan, Shaanxi, and Hunan provinces. The report documents how, despite increasing regulation and sporadic enforcement targeting polluting factories, local authorities are ignoring the urgent and long-term health consequences of a generation of children continuously exposed to life-threatening levels of lead.

This 67-page report details how despite the Chinese government's progress in protection of some economic and social rights, it has undermined many of the key goals of the National Human Rights Action Plan (NHRAP) by tightening restrictions on rights of expression, association, and assembly over the past two years.

This 73-page report is based on more than 200 interviews with Tibetan refugees and visitors conducted immediately after they left China, as well as fresh, not previously reported, official Chinese sources.

This 37-page report based on research in Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, documents how China's June 2008 Anti-Drug Law compounds the health risks of suspected illicit drug users by allowing government officials and security forces to incarcerate them for up to six years. The incarceration is without trial or judicial oversight.

This 53-page report documents how government officials, security forces, and their agents routinely abduct people off the streets of Beijing and other Chinese cities, strip them of their possessions, and imprison them. These black jails are often located in state-owned hotels, nursing homes, and psychiatric hospitals.

This 44-page report documents the enforced disappearances of 43 Uighur men and teenage boys who were detained by Chinese security forces in the wake of the protests.

In China, illicit drug use is an administrative offense and Chinese law dictates that drug users “must be rehabilitated.” In reality, police raids on drug users often drive them underground, away from methadone clinics, needle exchange sites, and other proven HIV prevention services.

This 60-page report documents numerous violations of human rights by the Nepali authorities, particularly the police, against Tibetans involved in peaceful demonstrations in Kathmandu, including: unnecessary and excessive use of force; arbitrary arrest; sexual assault of women during arrest; arbitrary and preventive detention; beatings in detention; unlawful threats to deport Tibetans to China; restrictions on freedom of movement in the Kathmandu Valley; harassment of Tibetan and foreign journalists; and harassment of Nepali, Tibetan, and foreign human rights defenders.

This 71-page report draws on more than 60 interviews with correspondents in China between December 2007 and June 2008. It documents how foreign correspondents and their sources continue to face intimidation and obstruction by government officials or their proxies when they pursue stories that can embarrass the authorities, expose official wrongdoing, or document social unrest.

This 142-page report details consistent patterns of abuses against legal practitioners. These include intimidation, harassment, suspension of professional licenses, disbarment, physical assaults, and even arrest and prosecution when lawyers take politically sensitive cases, seek redress for abuses of power and wrongdoings by party or government agents, or challenge local power-holders.

This 23-page report documents how such children live without legal identity or access to elementary education. These children live in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in eastern Jilin Province, northeast China (near its border with North Korea). Some are from North Korea while others were born in China and have Chinese fathers and North Korean mothers.

This 61-page report documents the Chinese government’s failure to fulfill long-repeated promises to protect the rights of migrant construction workers, as well as to end deprivations caused by the discriminatory nature of China’s household registration (hukou) system. An estimated 1 million migrant construction workers, hailing from other parts of China, make up nearly 90 percent of Beijing’s construction workforce.

As it enters its second year, the Council must take hold of the many situations that “require the HRC’s attention,” and take action of some sort to address them. The HRC’s efforts to address these situations will provide an important indication of its ability to fulfil the purpose for which it was created.

This 40-page report documents how Chinese authorities have repeatedly obstructed the work of foreign journalists this year, even though China on January 1, 2007, adopted temporary regulations to comply with commitments it made to the International Olympics Committee (IOC) on guaranteeing journalists freedom. The report draws on interviews and information provided from 36 foreign and Chinese journalists in June 2007.

This 79-page report documents how the government’s policy of forced resettlement has violated the economic and social rights of Tibetan herders. It draws on interviews conducted between July 2004 and December 2006 with some 150 Tibetans from the areas directly affected.