Word: bequelin
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...even harsher than the crackdown that followed the violent suppression of protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in March 2008. Officials said several hundred protesters had already been arrested and some 90 more were still being sought on Monday afternoon. "I fear for what is to come," said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for New York City-based Human Rights Watch. "China has a very poor record of accountability when it comes to those arrested for protesting. In Tibet, for example, there are still hundreds unaccounted for by the government's own admission." (See pictures of the March 2008 riots...
...that Sunday's protests took place in Urumqi, where Uighurs make up a tiny proportion of the population. "Urumqi is the center of Chinese power and influence in Xinjiang, and there haven't been any protests there since the early '90s, which makes this very, very unusual," said Gladney. Bequelin of Human Rights Watch concurred, noting that not only is the Uighur population small, but also that the city was already under very tight control by the security forces, meaning that "such a shockingly high death toll must have meant a complete breakdown of law and order...
...advocate, disappearance. But this month's apparent disbarment of the country's top human-rights lawyers could permanently damage legal-reform efforts. "You can't pretend you care about legal reform and the rule of law if you let the vanguard of legal reform be decapitated overnight," says Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch...
...these lawyers, the government will turn a group of people working within the system into a group of outsiders. "If they don't have many avenues to protest what has happened to them, then it can easily turn into a situation where they will be seen as dissidents," says Bequelin. And once they fall into that category, the lawyers will lose whatever marginal protections their profession once gave them...
...says that Tibet shouldn't be considered a sensitive subject, and that the Open Constitution Initiative hasn't run into any problems with the government since releasing its study. But Bequelin says that the report hasn't caused trouble because it hasn't been widely distributed or covered within China. And while he notes that the group has been able to post the document on its website, he doubts printed copies will ever be permitted to circulate on the mainland...