China called on to free net activists

Amnesty International today called for the release of at least 33 people jailed in China for using the internet to share their views.

The London-based human rights group's report on state control of the internet in China, published today, identifies a new category of dissident - those jailed for so-called "online subversion".

"Everyone who is detained purely for peacefully publishing their views or other information on the internet, or for accessing certain websites is a prisoner of conscience and should be released immediately and unconditionally," Amnesty International said.

Louise Vischer of Amnesty's China research desk says that the 33 detainees listed in the report are likely to be a mere fraction of the real number of people held for expressing their views online. Fourteen of them are members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which was banned by China in July 1999, while four are members of the China Democracy party.

"Three [of the 33] have died in custody; two of them are believed to have died as a result of torture, and a third as a result of suspicious circumstances," she said.

The spread of the internet in China has been phenomenal; the Amnesty report quotes predictions that the nation will take its place as the largest internet market in the world by 2006. But such growth is set against the China's strenuous efforts to restrict its citizens' access to the web.

Amnesty claims that China employs some 30,000 "internet police" to monitor its citizens' behaviour online. It also details some of the 60-plus laws regulating internet use brought in since 1995, including the death penalty for those found guilty of using the net to provide "state secrets" to foreign individuals or organisations.

These rules are applied in a three-pronged approach - blocking and filtering websites, bulletin boards and search engines, and closing internet cafes. A fire at an internet cafe in Beijing in June 2002 prompted the Chinese government to close 2,400 of the city's internet cafes for safety reasons. Amnesty International is concerned that the fire was used as "a pretext to crack down still further on freedom of expression in China."

Those internet cafes allowed to remain open use filtering software that "prevents access to 500,000 foreign newspapers, websites promoting Falun Gong, democracy and human rights, and others which are considered "reactionary" or otherwise "politically sensitive"."

China's attempt to block access to the search engine Google in August this year illustrated how it was trying to keep tabs on what the Chinese public viewed online. Following an outcry in China and around the world, Google is now available again, but searches for certain key words such as Taiwan and Tiananmen are still blocked, according to Amnesty.

Amnesty also reports claims that foreign firms have been supplying China with the technology to censor internet users under the country's "Golden Shield" project, under which "a massive surveillance database system will reportedly provide access to records of every citizen".

"Amnesty is concerned that foreign companies may be contributing to human rights violations by providing the technology - the hardware and software - that censors and restricts freedom of expression," Ms Vischer explains.

Asked about the Amnesty report at a regular foreign ministry news briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan said he had not seen or heard of it. But he noted that China is a nation governed by law.

"In the past, Amnesty International has published a lot of groundless reports," Mr Kong said. "We handle cases according to law."

Amnesty said the 33 imprisoned were tried in secret and sentenced mostly for subversion. They include:

- Huang Qi, a computer engineer from the southwest province of Sichuan whose website was used to criticise the government. Mr Huang was arrested in June 2000 and charged with subversion, but no verdict was ever announced.

- Jin Haike, Xu Wei, Yang Zili and Zhang Honghai, members of a Beijing political study association who posted articles about democratic reform. They were put on trial in April 2001, but no verdict was ever announced.

- Qi Yanchen, a freelance writer from the northern province of Hebei. He posted articles calling for political reform on the Internet and, in May 2000, was sentenced to four years for subversion.

- Li Dawei, a former police officer from Gansu in western China who downloaded articles from Chinese democracy websites based overseas. He was tried in 2001 on subversion charges and sentenced to 11 years.