LI RUIRUI was 20 years old when she came from Anhui province to Beijing to petition the government about what she felt was mistreatment at her school.
“I was mocked in school by my teachers and classmates,” she said.
Rather than getting a hearing, she was instead held against her will at the Juyuan hotel, one of the city’s “black jails” where petitioners are held to stop them talking to the authorities.
She was placed in a filthy storeroom with a group of other petitioners and watched over by hired thugs. On August 4th she was raped by one of the guards.
“After what happened to me, three other people from Henan and Anhui provinces smashed the door open so I could run out,” she said in a telephone interview.
Ms Li is one of many who have suffered abuse in the black jails of Beijing and other provincial capitals. Government officials, police officers and hired thugs are colluding to keep large numbers of people in these illegal detention centres, which have been set up for the detention of petitioners who come to Beijing to seek redress for abuses, a new report has shown.
An Alleyway in Hell from Human Rights Watch details how, since 2003, state agents have routinely violated the human rights of those in the black jails, which are often found in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals, or which are squalid storerooms in cheap hotels.
Their purpose is to stop petitioners from making trouble for local authorities, with guards subjecting them to physical violence, theft, extortion, threats, intimidation and deprivation of food, sleep, and medical care.
“The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government’s rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law,” Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said. “The government should move swiftly to close these facilities, investigate those running them and provide assistance to those abused in them.”
Petitioning is an ancient system dating from the imperial age, where Chinese people who felt they were being abused by the system turned to the emperor for help, travelling to Beijing to petition the supreme authority. Their complaints range from illegal land grabs and government corruption to police torture. The tradition has continued in the communist era.
Local government officials are under pressure to stop petitioners travelling, with bureaucratic penalties imposed when there is a large flow from their areas. Consequently, they are happy when petitioners are locked up.
The Chinese government denies the existence of the black jails, but state media such as the Xinhua news agency and China Daily have reported on incidents that have taken place within their confines.
On August 11th, Xu Jian (26) reportedly surrendered to police in Tongbai and confessed to raping Ms Li. The trial began earlier this month and she is awaiting the verdict. “I only want just punishment for the man who attacked me,” she said.
