Release of Chen Guangcheng report on women's rights abuses in China
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has obtained and released a report from Chen Guangcheng’s 2005 investigation into coercive family planning in Linyi County. The 35-page report was drafted by human rights attorney, Teng Biao.
WRWF released the report on Chen’s 40th birthday, Saturday November 12. The Chinese authorities imprisoned Chen for four years and three months for his study of family planning practices in China and have kept him and his family under strict house arrest since September, 2010.
The Chen Guangcheng report includes accounts of a woman forcibly aborted and sterilized at seven months; villagers sleeping in fields to evade family planning officials; officials who broke three brooms over the head of an elderly man and forced a grandmother and her brother to beat each other. There is a detailed discussion in the report of the use of quota systems and the practice of “implication” – the detention, fining and torture of the extended family of One Child Policy “violators.” The report ends with an impassioned postscript by Teng Biao.
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers reports that the human rights situation has not improved in Linyi since 2005. Earlier this year, family planning officials stabbed a man to death. A woman, six months’ pregnant, recently died during a forced abortion in Lijing County, also in Shandong Province.
Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, said that “the spirit of the Cultural Revolution lives on in China’s Family Planning death machine. WRWF has chosen to release the names of the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity, so that they can be held accountable before the world,” she said.
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers encourages supporters to join the Chen Sunglasses Freedom Campaign.
http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=chen-sunglasses
People everywhere photograph themselves wearing sunglasses in honor of Chen and send it to be posted on the WRWF website, showing they want Chen free.
Read the Chen Guangcheng Report
The news that Chen Guangcheng has been imprisoned for 4 years for his report made me think a lot. Is completely incredible the Chinese dichotomy between technological development and economical avant-garde ofthe state and at the same time the restrictive and intolerant civil approach toward human rights. China is in the middle of a great economic boom, involved by the huge inflow of foreign investment and by the fast increase of the export. For these reasons It has emerged as a significant force in the worldwide economy. In 2003 it overcoming U.S.A as main addressee of foreign investments. But it seems that this suddenly growing is not going side by side with the recogntion of the civil rights in China. Most academic think China will be the first importangt nation of the world for its surprising expansion. But II seriously don’t know if it would be possible taking in account the example of Chen Guangcheng and the instances he shown in his report : a woman died during a forced abortion and the other horrible crimes happing in this country. Is it possible that a state can be take on as the world leader instead of its still going social and educative backwardness? How in the measure of the states’ power we only consider them from an economical perspective?
Martina Schiavon