Amnesty Plea Over Internet Prisoners

Human rights group Amnesty International is urging China to free more than 30 people jailed by the government for using the internet to access banned sites or express pro-democratic views.

The charity wants to draw attention to China's attempts to suppress the internet by filtering foreign sites, including search engine Google and the BBC homepage, and setting up a special police unit to catch people accessing banned material.

"Everyone detained purely for peacefully publishing their views or other information on the Internet or for accessing certain Web sites are prisoners of conscience," said Amnesty in a statement.

It added that China had imprisoned at least 33 people for offences related to internet use, but that two members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement had died in custody.

Amnesty said among those held was former police officer Li Dawei, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for downloading articles from pro-democracy web sites abroad, it said.

In late August, China blocked access to Internet search engine Google in a media clampdown ahead of the watershed 16th Party Congress earlier this month, when President Jiang Zemin handed power to a new generation of leaders.

Access to Google was blocked for two weeks when a link on the site was discovered to lead to a game called 'Slap the Evil Dictator Jiang Zemin'. Access was later restored, but with certain links blocked.

The BBC, which has had its site blocked in China for some time, drew attention to the growing problem earlier this month when it disclosed that its World Service site in Vietnam had also been censored by the authorities.

"Internet users are increasingly caught in a tight web of rules restricting their fundamental human rights," said Amnesty.

"Anyone surfing the internet could potentially be at risk of arbitrary detention and imprisonment," it added.

China, the world's most populous nation, is second only to the US in terms of web traffic. It had almost 46 million internet users at the end of October and is expected to become the largest internet market in the world within four years.