Word: humanity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...knows nothing of her long history of mental illness, “two hysteric aunts, an uncle who talked to eggplants, and a cousin who wore his clothes back to front.” Smith’s novel condemns neither side, and instead shows flawed and evocatively human aspects of both cultures...
...experts caution that China still needs a wholesale examination of how its legal system handles detainees. A report released Nov. 12 by New York-based Human Rights Watch describes a system of "black jails" in Beijing and provincial capitals that operate outside the law, though with the implicit approval of police and judicial officials...
...officials. Local and regional governments arrange teams of "retrievers" who round up petitioners before they can put their complaints before higher authorities. The petitioners are held in black jails - which could be anything from a hotel to an empty school - for weeks or even months before being sent home. Human Rights Watch interviewed 38 former black-jail detainees who described beatings, sleep deprivation and lack of food and medical care. A black-jail guard went on trial in Beijing this month for allegedly raping a 21-year-old petitioner...
...difficulty in improving the treatment of people in black jails is that the government has so far refused to acknowledge that they exist. In a periodic review before the U.N. Human Rights Council in June, the Chinese government said there were no black jails in the country. "The very sinister aspect of black jails is that they are completely off the books," says Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "These are unlawful, secret detention facilities that are not under any due legal process. The detainees don't have access to lawyers. They are stripped of their mobile...
...Following a public outcry over Sun's death, the government eliminated "custody and repatriation," or shourong in Mandarin. "But vagrancy-detention-era abuses did not end with the abolition of shourong," states the Human Rights Watch report. "Instead, such abuses have been driven underground into new extrajudicial 'black jails.' " It's an unpleasant lesson in the dangers of treating the symptoms without addressing the cause...