Chinese authorities have carried out their first executions of Tibetans in connection with the deadly riots that swept Lhasa last year, according to exile groups.

As the first reported judicial killings in the region for six years, the news has prompted overseas protests and concerns that proper legal procedures were not followed.

The Chinese state media have yet to confirm the executions. However, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, based in Dharamsala in northern India, said it had reports that they took place early on Tuesday morning.

It identified three of the executed Tibetans as two men – Lobsang Gyaltsen and Loyak – and a woman named Penkyi. The fourth victim was not named.

The Lhasa intermediate people's court sentenced the two men to death on charges of arson in April, according to Xinhua news agency reports at the time. Under Chinese law, death penalty cases should be reviewed by the supreme court.

The Dharamsala-based group said the body of Lobsang Gyaltsen had been handed to his family, while Loyak's ashes were given to his relatives.

The director of Free Tibet, Stephanie Brigden, said the executions were an outrage. "It is impossible to have any confidence that even the most basic legal norms were observed before the Chinese state sanctioned and carried out the killing of these four Tibetans," she said.

London-based Tibetan groups called for a vigil outside the Chinese embassy. Free Tibet said the executions, which came just weeks after a Foreign Office minister, Ivan Lewis, made a rare trip to Lhasa, should prompt the British government to rethink the way it engages with China over the region.

Labour MP Kate Hoey has tabled an early day motion calling for an inquiry into the UK government's failure to secure human rights improvements in Tibet.

A US congressional commission will publish a study of Tibet next week which finds Chinese officials are strengthening efforts to separate Tibetan Buddhists from the Dalai Lama, and preparing to select his successor. However the study also notes that the Dalai Lama's willingness to restrict discussions only to areas that China considers part of Tibet have opened up an unprecedented opportunity for progress.

In a separate case, Reporters Without Borders called for the release of three Tibetans who have been held since 1 October for allegedly sending information about Tibet to contacts abroad via the internet.

It said the three have not been permitted to contact their families during detentions.

"The internet is monitored, censored and manipulated more in Tibet than in other Chinese provinces," Reporters Without Borders said. "Despite the risks, Tibetan internet users continue to transmit information, especially to the diaspora and human rights groups. It is deplorable that the Chinese police devote so much energy to identifying and arresting ordinary internet users."

The Tibetan Government-in-Exile has released new video footage of the protests in Lhasa last year that confirms the use of extreme violence and torture by Chinese authorities. The Chinese communist regime has always denied that torture is used in Tibet.

"This extremely rare and shocking footage confirms our worst fears about the horrific pain and suffering Tibetans are experiencing at the hands of the Chinese authorities in the wake of last year's uprising," said Lhadon Tethong, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet, in a press release.

"The brutality of the Chinese authorities against Tibetans in this footage is not the exception to, but rather the rule of, Beijing's treatment of the Tibetan people over the past 50 years,” he said.

One segment of the video, recorded on March 14, 2008, shows Chinese police beating Tibetan prisoners with batons, after they were arrested in the protests. The prisoners have their hands tied behind their backs and can only curl in an attempt to resist the beatings.

Another segment of the video shows gruesome images of a young Tibetan by the name of Tendar being tortured by Chinese authorities. He was reportedly fired at, beaten with an electric baton, burned with cigarettes, and his right foot was pierced by a nail.

The video shows him after being brought to the TAR People’s Hospital. His body is covered with rotting wounds from lack of proper treatment. Tendar died from his injuries on June 19, 2008.

The protests in Tibet began on March 10, 2008, leading up to the Beijing Olympics.

Officials from the Chinese Communist Party have repeatedly denied that torture was used in Tibet. In November 2008 when the U.N. panel released a report on the use of torture on Tibetans by Chinese police, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the reports “untrue and slanderous” and accused the committee members of being “prejudiced” against China. However, the regime imposed martial law and banned tourists and journalists from Tibet for months after the protests.

Tibetan activists have asked, why, if the communist regime has nothing to hide, does it lock down the country and deny any independent investigation?

In the Lhasa protests and the following crackdown by the communist regime, close to 220 Tibetans were killed, more than 1,294 were seriously injured, and more than 1,000 simply disappeared. The Chinese authorities arrested more than 5,600 Tibetans, of which 290 are known to have been sentenced.

The video, which is graphic and at times difficult to watch, can be seen:  http://footage.tibetanbridges.com/Torture-in-Tibet.mov

1. Burning
2. Electric Shock
3. Sexual Abuse
4. Psychiatric & Drug Abuse
5. Force-feeding
6. Savage beatings
7. Freezing and Exposing
8. Water Dungeon
9. Forced Abortions
10. “Death Bed”
11. “Tiger Bench”
12. “Hell Confinement”
13. “Small Cage”
14. Forced to Jump from Tall Building
15. “Flying an Airplane“
16. “Squat“
17. “Handcuffed in a Painful Position”
18. “Tied up”
19. Sitting on “Triangle-ridged Iron Plank”
20. “Carrying a Sword on the Back”
21. “Chain”
22. “Tied to a Bed”
23. “Tortured under a Bed”
24. “Tied to Trees”
25. “Solitary Confinement”
26. “Rope Tying”
27. “Hanging over the Head”
28. “Hanging by Two Thumbs”
29. “Hanging Upside Down”
30. Hung Up for Extended Period of Time
31. “Dog Bite”
32. “Snake Bite”
33. “Cutting of Flesh”
34. “Impaling the Fingers and Toes with Bamboo Stick”
35. “Needle Piercing” and “Toe Smashing”
36. Cigarette Burn
37. The Rampant Spread of Scabies
38. Forced to Sit in a “Sewage Pot”
39. Garbage Stuffed into the Mouth
40. Phlegm Poured into the Mouth
41. Force-Feeding with Urine
42. Force-Feeding with Feces
43. Deprivation of Sleep
44. Restricting the Use of the Toilet
45. Prohibiting the Use of Sanitary Napkins
46. “Covering a Shed” or Suffocation

Practitioners of Falun Gong were forbidden to communicate openly. Yet as the guards motioned for them to begin walking, Wang felt the group fall into step like a gentle migrating herd. He looked down at the red earth, streaked with straw and human waste, to the barren mountains on the horizon. Whatever lay ahead, Wang knew they were not afraid.

After 20 minutes, he saw a large gleaming structure in the distance--maybe it was a hospital, Wang thought. The summer of 2001 had been brutal in South China. After he'd worked for months in the burning sun, Wang's shaved head had become deeply infected. Perhaps it was getting a little better. Or perhaps he had just become used to it; lately he only noticed the warm, rancid stench of his rotting scalp when he woke up.

Wang broke the silence, asking one of the police guards if that was the camp hospital ahead. The guard responded evenly: "You know, we care so much about you. So we are taking you to get a physical. Look how well the party treats you. Normally, this kind of thing never happens in a labor camp."

Inside the facility, the practitioners lined up and, one by one, had a large blood sample drawn. Then a urine sample, electrocardiogram, abdominal X-ray, and eye exam. When Wang pointed to his head, the doctor mumbled something about it being normal and motioned for the next patient. Walking back to camp, the prisoners felt relieved, even a tad cocky, about the whole thing. In spite of all the torture they had endured and the brutal conditions, even the government would be forced to see that practitioners of Falun Gong were healthy.

They never did learn the results of any of those medical tests, Wang says, a little smile suddenly breaking through. He can't help it. He survived.

I spoke with Wang in 2007, just one out of over 100 interviews for a book on the clash between Falun Gong and the Chinese state. Wang's story is not new. Two prominent Canadian human rights attorneys, David Kilgour and David Matas, outlined his case and many others in their "Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China," published and posted on the web in 2006.

By interviewing Wang, I was tipping my hat to the extensive research already done by others. I was not expecting to see Wang's pattern repeated as my interviews progressed, nor did I expect to find that organ harvesting had spread beyond Falun Gong. I was wrong.

Falun Gong became wildly popular in China during the late 1990s. For various reasons--perhaps because the membership of this movement was larger than that of the Chinese Communist party (and intersected with it), or because the legacy of Tiananmen was unresolved, or because 70 million people suddenly seemed to be looking for a way into heaven (other than money)--the party decided to eliminate it. In 1998, the party quietly canceled the business licenses of people who practiced Falun Gong. In 1999 came mass arrests, seizure of assets, and torture. Then, starting in 2000, as the movement responded by becoming more openly activist, demonstrating at Tiananmen and hijacking television signals on the mainland, the death toll started to climb, reaching approximately 3,000 confirmed deaths by torture, execution, and neglect by 2005.

At any given time, 100,000 Falun Gong practitioners were said to be somewhere in the Chinese penal system. Like most numbers coming out of China, these were crude estimates, further rendered unreliable by the chatter of claim and counterclaim. But one point is beyond dispute: The repression of Falun Gong spun out of control. Arrests, sentencing, and whatever took place in the detention centers, psychiatric institutions, and labor camps were not following any established legal procedure or restraint. As an act of passive resistance, or simply to avoid trouble for their families, many Falun Gong began withholding their names from the police, identifying themselves simply as "practitioner" or "Dafa disciple." When asked for their home province, they would say "the universe." For these, the nameless ones, whose families had no way of tracing them or agitating on their behalf, there may be no records at all.

In early 2006, the first charges of large-scale harvesting--surgical removal of organs while the prisoners were still alive, though of course the procedure killed them--of Falun Gong emerged from Northeast China. The charges set off a quiet storm in the human rights community. Yet the charge was not far-fetched.

Harry Wu, a Chinese dissident who established the Laogai Foundation, had already produced reams of evidence that the state, after executing criminals formally sentenced to death, was selling their kidneys, livers, corneas, and other body parts to Chinese and foreigners, anyone who could pay the price. The practice started in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s, with the use of anti-tissue- rejection drugs pioneered by China, the business had progressed. Mobile organ-harvesting vans run by the armed services were routinely parked just outside the killing grounds to ensure that the military hospitals got first pick. This wasn't top secret. I spoke with a former Chinese police officer, a simple man from the countryside, who said that, as a favor to a condemned man's friend, he had popped open the back of such a van and unzipped the body bag. The corpse's chest had been picked clean.

Taiwanese doctors who arranged for patients to receive transplants on the mainland claim that there was no oversight of the system, no central Chinese database of organs and medical histories of donors, no red tape to diminish medical profits. So the real question was, at $62,000 for a fresh kidney, why would Chinese hospitals waste any body they could get their hands on?

Yet what initially drew most fire from skeptics was the claim that organs were being harvested from people before they died. For all the Falun Gong theatrics, this claim was not so outlandish either. Any medical expert knows that a recipient is far less likely to reject a live organ; and any transplant dealer will confirm that buyers will pay more for one. Until recently, high volume Chinese transplant centers openly advertised the use of live donors on their websites.

It helps that brain death is not legally recognized in China; only when the heart stops beating is the patient actually considered dead. That means doctors can shoot a prisoner in the head, as it were, surgically, then remove the organs before the heart stops beating. Or they can administer anesthesia, remove the organs, and when the operation is nearing completion introduce a heart- stopping drug--the latest method. Either way, the prisoner has been executed, and harvesting is just fun along the way. In fact, according to doctors I have spoken to recently, all well versed in current mainland practices, live-organ harvesting of death-row prisoners in the course of execution is routine.

The real problem was that the charges came from Falun Gong--always the unplanned child of the dissident community. Unlike the Tiananmen student leaders and other Chinese prisoners of conscience who had settled into Western exile, Falun Gong marched to a distinctly Chinese drum. With its roots in a spiritual tradition from the Chinese heartland, Falun Gong would never have built a version of the Statue of Liberty and paraded it around for CNN. Indeed, to Western observers, Falun Gong public relations carried some of the uncouthness of Communist party culture: a perception that practitioners tended to exaggerate, to create torture tableaux straight out of a Cultural Revolution opera, to spout slogans rather than facts.

For various reasons, some valid, some shameful, the credibility of persecuted refugees has often been doubted in the West. In 1939, a British Foreign Office official, politely speaking for the majority, described the Jews as not, perhaps, entirely reliable witnesses. During the Great Leap Forward, emaciated refugees from the mainland poured into Hong Kong, yammering about deserted villages and cannibalism. Sober Western journalists ignored these accounts as subjective and biased.

The yammering of a spiritual revivalist apparently counts for even less than the testimony of a peasant or a Jew. Thus, when Falun Gong unveiled a doctor's wife who claimed that her husband, a surgeon, had removed thousands of corneas from practitioners in a Northeastern Chinese hospital named Sujiatun, the charge met with guarded skepticism from the dissident community and almost complete silence from the Western press (with the exception of this magazine and National Review).

As Falun Gong committees kicked into full investigative mode, the Canadian lawyers Kilgour and Matas compiled the accumulating evidence in their report. It included transcripts of recorded phone calls in which Chinese doctors confirmed that their organ donors were young, healthy, and practiced Falun Gong; written testimony from the mainland of practitioners' experiences in detention; an explosion in organ transplant activity coinciding with a rise in the Falun Gong incarceration rate, with international customers waiting as little as a week for a tissue match (in most countries, patients waited over a year). Finally, Kilgour and Matas compared the execution rate in China (essentially constant, according to Amnesty International) and the number of transplants. It left a discrepancy of 41,500 unexplained cases over a five-year span.

This report has never been refuted point by point, yet the vast majority of human rights activists have kept their distance. Since Falun Gong's claims were suspect, their allies' assertions were suspect. Transplant doctors who claimed to have Falun Gong organ donors in the basement? They were just saying what potential organ recipients wanted to hear. Written testimony from practitioners? They'd been prepped by activists. The rise in organ transplant activity? Maybe just better reporting. The discrepancy between executions and transplants? As a respected human rights scholar asked me, why did Kilgour and Matas use Amnesty International's estimate of the number of executions in China to suggest the execution rate had stayed constant for 10 years? Even Amnesty acknowledges their numbers might represent a gross understatement. There might be no discrepancy at all.

Finally, why had no real witness, a doctor or nurse who had actually operated on Falun Gong practitioners, come forward? Without such proof (although such an individual's credibility can always be savaged, even with supporting documents), human rights advocates argued there was no reason to take the story seriously. There certainly were not sufficient grounds for President Bush to mention organ harvesting in his human rights speech on the eve of the Beijing Olympics.

The critics had hinted at legitimate points of discussion. But so had the Chinese government: Fresh off the confession in 2005 that organs were being harvested from ordinary death-row prisoners, and after issuing their predictable denials of harvesting organs from Falun Gong, Beijing suddenly passed a law in July 2006 forbidding the sale of organs without the consent of the donor.

Three things happened. The organ supply tightened. Prices doubled. And transplants continued. So unless there has been a dramatic cultural shift since 2004, when a Chinese report found that only 1.5 percent of transplanted kidneys were donated by relatives, the organs being sold must still come from somewhere. Let's assume it's prisoners--that's what Taiwanese doctors think--and theorize that the new law was a signal: Get your consent forms and stop harvesting from Falun Gong. For now.

And the critics had one thing exactly right: Precision is an illusion. No taped conversation with a mainland doctor is unimpeachable. All witnesses from China have mixed motives, always. And, again, no numbers from China, even the one in the last paragraph, can be considered definitive.

Indeed, the entire investigation must be understood to be still at an early, even primitive, stage. We do not really know the scale of what is happening yet. Think of 1820, when a handful of doctors, scientists, and amateur fossil hunters were trying to make sense of scattered suggestive evidence and a disjointed pile of bones. Twenty-two years would pass before an English paleontologist so much as coined the term "dinosaur"--"terrible lizard"--and the modern study of these extinct creatures got seriously under way. Those of us researching the harvesting of organs from involuntary donors in China are like the early dinosaur hunters. We don't work in close consultation with each other. We are still waiting for even one doctor who has harvested organs from living prisoners of conscience to emerge from the mainland. Until that happens, it is true, we don't even have dinosaur bones. But we do have tracks. Here are some that I've found.

Qu Yangyao, an articulate Chinese professional, holds three master's degrees. She is also the earliest refugee to describe an "organs only" medical examination. Qu escaped to Sydney last year. While a prisoner in China in June 2000, she refused to "transform"--to sign a statement rejecting Falun Gong--and was eventually transferred to a labor camp. Qu's health was fairly good, though she had lost some weight from hunger strikes. Given Qu's status and education, there were reasons to keep her healthy. The Chinese police wanted to avoid deaths in custody--less paperwork, fewer questions. At least, so Qu assumed.

Qu was 35 years old when the police escorted her and two other practitioners into a hospital. Qu distinctly remembers the drawing of a large volume of blood, then a chest X-ray, and probing. "I wasn't sure what it was about. They just touch you in different places . . . abdomen, liver." She doesn't remember giving a urine sample at that time, but the doctor did shine a light in her eyes, examining her corneas.

Did the doctor then ask her to trace the movement of his light with her eyes, or check her peripheral vision? No. He just checked her corneas, skipping any test involving brain function. And that was it: no hammer on the knee, no feeling for lymph nodes, no examination of ears or mouth or genitals--the doctor checked her retail organs and nothing else.

I may have felt a silent chill run up my spine at points in our interview, but Qu, like many educated subjects, seemed initially unaware of the potential implications of what she was telling me. Many prisoners preserve a kind of "it can't happen here" sensibility. "I'm too important to be wiped out" is the survivor's mantra. In the majority of the interviews presented here, my subjects, though aware of the organ harvesting issue, had no clear idea of my line of questioning or the "right" answers.

Falun Gong practitioners are forbidden to lie. That doesn't mean they never do. In the course of my interviews I've heard a few distortions. Not because people have been "prepped," but because they've suffered trauma. Deliberate distortions, though, are exceedingly rare. The best way to guard against false testimony is to rely on extended sit-down interviews.

In all, I interviewed 15 Falun Gong refugees from labor camps or extended detention who had experienced something inexplicable in a medical setting. My research assistant, Leeshai Lemish, interviewed Dai Ying in Norway, bringing our total to 16. If that number seems low, consider the difficulty of survival and escape. Even so, just over half of the subjects can be ruled out as serious candidates for organ harvesting: too old, too physically damaged from hard labor, or too emaciated from hunger strikes. Some were simply too shaky in their recall of specific procedures to be much help to us. Some were the subjects of drug tests. Some received seemingly normal, comprehensive physicals, though even such people sometimes offered valuable clues.

For example, Lin Jie, a woman in her early 60s living in Sydney, reported that in May 2001, while she was incarcerated in the Chongqing Yong Chaun Women's Jail, over 100 Falun Gong women were examined "all over the body, very detailed. And they asked about our medical history." Fine. Yet Lin found herself wondering why "one police per practitioner" escorted the women through the physical, as if they were dangerous criminals. Practitioners of Falun Gong are many things--intense, moralistic, single-minded--but they are strictly nonviolent. Clearly someone in the Chinese security system was nervous.

Or take Jing Tian, a female refugee in her 40s, now in Bangkok. In March 2002, the Shenyang Detention Center gave a comprehensive physical to all the practitioners. Jing watched the procedure carefully and saw nothing unusual. Then, in September, the authorities started expensive blood tests (these would cost about $300 per subject in the West). Jing observed that they were drawing enough blood to fill up eight test tubes per practitioner, enough for advanced diagnostics or tissue matching. Jia Xiarong, a middle-aged female prisoner who came from a family of well-connected officials, told Jing outright: "They are doing this because some aging official needs an organ."

But Jing sensed something else in the air that fall, something more substantial: Prisoners were arriving in the middle of the night and disappearing before dawn. There were transports to "hospital civil defense structures" with names like Sujiatun and Yida, and practitioners with no names, only numbers.

It was not a good time to be an angry young practitioner, according to a refugee in her 30s recently arrived in Hong Kong. She has family in China, so let's call her Jiansheng Chen. Back in 2002, Chen noticed another pattern. When the blood tests started, she said, "before signing a statement [renouncing Falun Gong] the practitioners were all given physicals. After they signed, they wouldn't get a physical again."

Chen was a "nontransformable"--with an edge. Not only did she refuse to renounce Falun Gong, but she shouted down anyone who did. Chen was getting medication three times a day (possibly sedatives), so drug-testing can't be ruled out. Yet as her resistance dragged on, the police said: "If you don't transform, we'll send you away. The path you have chosen is the path of death." For eight days efforts were made to persuade Chen to renounce Falun Gong or gain her submission by torture. Suddenly the guards ordered her to write a suicide note. Chen mocked them: "I'm not dead. So why should I sign a death certificate?"

The director brought in a group of military police doctors wearing white uniforms, male and female. The labor camp police were "very frightened" at this point, according to Chen. They kept repeating: "If you still won't transform, what waits for you is a path to death."

Chen was blindfolded. Then she heard a familiar policewoman's voice asking the doctors to leave for a minute. When they were alone, the policewoman began pleading with her: "Chen, your life is going to be taken away. I'm not kidding you. We've been here together all this time, we've made at least some sort of connection by now. I can't bear to see this--a living person in front of my eyes about to be wiped out."

Chen stayed silent. She didn't trust the policewoman--why should she? In the last eight days, she had been hung from the ceiling. She had been burned with electric batons. She had drunk her own urine. So, the latest nice-nice trick was unconvincing. Then Chen noticed something dripping on her hand--the policewoman's tears. Chen allowed that she would think about transforming. "That's all I need," the policewoman said. After a protracted argument with the doctors, the police left.

Practitioners like to talk about altering the behavior of police and security personnel through the power of their own belief. It's a favorite trope. Just as a prisoner of war is duty bound to attempt escape, a Falun Gong practitioner is required by his moral code to try to save sentient beings. In this spiritual calculus, the policeman who uses torture destroys himself, not the practitioner. If the practitioner can alter the policeman's behavior, by moral example or supernatural means, there's some natural pride, even if the practitioner still gets tortured.

But practitioners vary. Chen did not tell her story with composure. She screamed it out cathartically, in a single note of abrasive, consuming fury. It's also relevant that Chen is not just stubborn, impossible, and a little mad, but young, attractive, and charismatic. She gave her account of the policewoman without braggadocio, only abject, shrieking shame at having finally signed a transformation statement. The policewoman had met a fellow warrior--her tears are plausible.

Dai Ying is a 50-year-old female refugee living in Sweden. As 2003 began, 180 Falun Gong were tested in Sanshui labor camp. The usual our-party-especially-cares-for-you speech was followed by X -rays, the drawing of massive blood samples, cardiograms, urine tests, and then probes: "They had us lie on [our] stomachs and examined our kidneys. They tapped on them and ask[ed] us if that hurt."

And that was it--organs only, hold the corneas--a fact that Dai, almost blind from torture at the time, remembers vividly. Corneas are relatively small-ticket items, worth perhaps $30,000 each. By 2003, Chinese doctors had mastered the liver transplant, worth about $115,000 from a foreign customer.

To meet the demand, a new source of supply was needed. Fang Siyi is a 40-year-old female refugee in Bangkok. Incarcerated from 2002 to 2005, Fang was examined repeatedly and then, in 2003, picked out for special testing in the Jilin detention center in Northeast China.

Fang had never seen the doctors before: "Upon arriving here, they changed into labor camp uniforms. But what struck me is that they seemed to be military doctors." Twelve prisoners had been selected. Fang estimates that eight were Falun Gong. How did she know? "For Falun Gong, they called them, Little Faluns." Who were the other four? "[The staff] would say, Here comes another one of those Eastern Lightning."

Eastern Lightning are Christians--fringy, out-there Chinese Christians to us, incurable, nontransformable deviants to the party. Jing, too, remembers Eastern Lightning being given blood tests in 2002, but Fang remembers the Jilin exam as far more focused: "The additional examinations would just be blood tests, electro-cardiograms, and X-rays, nothing else. It was Falun Gong practitioners and Christians."

Compassion fatigue seeping in? I'll keep this short.

"Masanjia Confidential" has family in China, so prudence dictates mentioning only that she's about 40 and is in Bangkok. Her experience takes us into what I call the "Late Harvest Era" of 2005, when many practitioners seem to have been whisked off to wham-bam organ exams and then promptly disappeared. When I asked her if anyone in Masanjia Labor Camp actually received medical treatment, she responded without missing a beat: "If people came in on a stretcher, they were given cursory treatment. In good health, a comprehensive exam. .  .  . They needed healthy people, young people. If you were an auntie in your 60s or 70s they wouldn't pay attention to you."

Were there military personnel present at the physicals? "They didn't need them. Masanjia is very close to Sujiatun [hospital]--a pretty quick drive. If they needed someone they could just tie them up and send them over. .  .  . Usually they were taken at night."

In 2007, Yu Xinhui, free after five years in Guangdong prison, signed himself, his wife, and their infant son up for a foreign trip with a Chinese tour group. Upon arriving in Bangkok, they fled to the YMCA and applied for U.N. refugee status. Yu is in his 30s, the picture of robust health. While in prison, he was tested repeatedly, finally graduating to an "organs-only" exam under military supervision in 2005.

Yu makes a good show of indulging my questions, but to him it was never a big mystery: "There was common knowledge of organ harvesting in the prison. .  .  . Even before you die, your organs are already reserved." Criminal prisoners would taunt the practitioners: "If you don't do what we say we'll torture you to death and sell your organs." That sounds like a stupid game, but everyone knew there was a real list: Prisoners and practitioners alike would be taken away on an annual schedule. Yu knew which month the buses would arrive and where they would park in the courtyard. He gave me a tour of the exact spot on Google Earth.

When Falun Gong's claims about organ harvesting surfaced in March 2006, Yu still languished in prison, incommunicado. So it's all the more interesting that he vividly remembers a large, panicky deportation of prisoners (perhaps 400 people, including practitioners) in May 2006. "It was terrifying," Yu says. "Even I was terrified." The timing is consistent: With all the bad publicity, mainland doctors were hinting at a close-of-business sale on organs at exactly this time.

By 2007, the consensus was that the Chinese government had shut down Falun Gong harvesting to avoid any embarrassing new disclosures before the Olympics. So my final case must be viewed as borderline, a comprehensive medical exam followed by .  .  . well, judge for yourself.

Liu Guifu is a 48-year-old woman recently arrived in Bangkok. She got a soup-to-nuts physical-- really a series of them--in Beijing Women's Labor Camp in 2007. She was also diagnosed as schizophrenic and possibly given drugs.

But she remembers her exams pretty well. She was given three urine tests in a single month. She was told to drink fluids and refrain from urinating until she got to the hospital. Was this testing for diabetes or drugs? It can't be ruled out. But neither can kidney-function assessment. And three major blood samples were drawn in the same month, at a cost of about $1,000. Was the labor camp concerned about Liu's health? Or the health of a particular organ? Perhaps an organ that was being tissue-matched with a high-ranking cadre or a rich foreign customer?

The critical fact is that Liu was both a member of a nontransformed Falun Gong brigade with a history of being used for organs and was considered mentally ill. She was useless, the closest approximation we have to a nameless practitioner, one of the ones who never gave their names or provinces to the authorities and so lost their meager social protections.

There were certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of practitioners identified by numbers only. I've heard that number two hundred and something was a talented young female artist with nice skin, but I don't really know. None of them made it out of China alive.

None of them likely will. Tibetan sources estimate that 5,000 protesters disappeared in this year's crackdown. Many have been sent to Qinghai, a potential centre of organ harvesting. But that's speculative. Both the Taiwanese doctors who investigate organ harvesting and those who arrange transplants for their Taiwanese patients agree on one point: The closing ceremony of the Olympics made it once again open season for harvesting.

Some in the human rights community will read that last assertion with skepticism. Until there is countervailing evidence, however, I'll bet on bargain-basement prices for organs in China. I confess, I feel a touch of burnout myself at this thought. It's an occupational hazard.

It's why I told that one-night-in-Bangkok joke to get you to read beyond the first paragraph. Yet what's really laughable is the foot-dragging, formalistic, faintly embarrassed response of so many to the murder of prisoners of conscience for the purpose of harvesting their organs. That's an evil crime.

Washington faces its own imperatives: The riptide of Chinese financial power is strong. Those in government do not want to hear about Falun Gong and genocide at a time of financial crisis, with China holding large numbers of U.S. bonds. So the story continues to founder under the lead weight of American political and journalistic apathy. At least the Europeans have given it some air. They can afford to. They aren't the leader of the free world.

It will be argued--quietly, of course--that America has no point of easy leverage, no ability to undo what has been done, no silver bullet that can change the Chinese regime. Perhaps not, but we could ban Americans from getting organ transplants in China. We could boycott Chinese medical conferences. Sever medical ties. Embargo surgical equipment. And refuse to hold any diplomatic summits until the Chinese put in place an explicit, comprehensive database of every organ donor in China.

We may have to live with the Chinese Communist party, for now. For that matter, we can console ourselves that there are no bones, for now. There will be none until the party falls and the Chinese people begin to sift through the graves and ashes.

We are all allowed a touch of compassion fatigue--it's understandable. But make no mistake: There are terrible lizards. And now that the Olympic Games are over, and the cameras have turned away, they roam the earth again.

Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, wishes to thank the Earhart Foundation and the Wallenberg family of Sweden for research support.

From Black and White Cat

The Youth Hotel in Beijing which does a side trade in locking up petitioners

Up until 2003, Custody and Repatriation (shourong) centers were used by the big cities to detain people without permits to work and live there before sending them back to where they had come from. Detainees would usually be held until relatives sent payment for their transport home. In the meantime they would have to work for their keep and there were many allegations of violence.

Then, one night in March 2003, a young designer in Guangzhou called Sun Zhigang was picked up on the street and detained for not being able to produce the required documentation. While he was being held, he was beaten to death. There was a storm of protest around the country which spread through the internet and mainstream media, and the entire legality of the system was challenged. Then, suddenly in June that year, the government announced it was abolishing Custody and Repatriation.

One of the groups of people who were detained through the abuse of the Custody and Repatriation system were petitioners. All Chinese citizens have the legal right to petition the authorities if they feel they have been wronged. Government departments have offices of Letters and Visits - at local, provincial and state levels. Officials at lower levels have a strong interest in preventing people from embarrassing them by petitioning at a higher level, so they frequently intercept petitioners, take them home, and often take revenge. Human Rights Watch published a useful study of this abuse in 2005. (Summary; full report)

When Custody and Repatriation was abolished, the so-called black jails sprang up to replace them as makeshift detention centers for petitioners. Officially, they don’t exist. Below, is my translation of three blog posts about one of these places written by Xu Zhiyong, a young professor at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications.

If you’re wondering why there’s no action in the photos at the top and bottom of this page, that’s because they were taken by me about a week after Xu Zhiyong’s first two posts. Once you’ve read his account, I think you might understand why I had no great desire to attract more any more attention than necessary while I was taking the pictures.

Early in the morning of September 21, I received an SMS from a petitioner from Henan saying they were locked up in a black jail in an alley behind the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street near Taoranting park.

For the last few years, I’ve kept hearing about black jails, but I thought they’d disappeared as we entered 2008. With this reappearance, I decided to go and take a look. This evil, ugly phenomenon cannot be tolerated.

I arrived at the dilapidated Youth Hotel on Taiping Street, followed the alley that runs along south of the hotel up to the No. 62 Middle School on the corner. Turning right along the alley after a hundred meters or so I saw several residents. A fat, bare-chested middle-aged man was squatting there. I couldn’t see any sign of the black jail so I asked the bare-chested guy, where they lock up the petitioners. He asked, where from. I said Henan, and he pointed to the side. It’s at the back of the Youth Hotel, there’s a white metal door and that’s the place.

The white metal door was locked. To the side was a window. Inside, a girl was watching television and a man was lying on a bed. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I knocked on the window. The girl woke up the man saying “Someone’s come to pick someone up, quick, open the door.” The man hurriedly looked for his keys, asking me “Where from?” I said Henan. Then he suddenly seemed to feel something wasn’t quite right and told me to contact him via the Henan representative office in Beijing. I said I knew someone called Wang Jinlan and wanted to see her. He said there was no one by that name there. So phoned Wang Jinlan and after a while she came to the window, demanding to go out, but she wasn’t allowed. I started to take a photograph of the window and man closed it.

Very quickly, six or seven men rushed out around me and one of them reached out to grab my camera. The bare-chested guy suddenly rushed up and punched me in the chest, acting like a crazy devil and carrying a chain-lock.

I was very calm and submitted to their insults and occasional blows. At one point they wanted to drag me into the black jail, but they were stopped by their boss. When they’d spent all their aggression I said, “Can I go now?” They said no. Then they must have thought of something because they let me go. As I was leaving, I looked back and said “You’ll regret what you did today, whether it’s because you’re punished or because of your conscience.”

I will go back. This isn’t meddling in other people’s business. Black jails are a tumour on Beijing. They’re a tumour on China. In the broad light of day, that there should be such dark and ugly corners. As a Chinese man, I have a duty to rise up in indignation.

September 22, 2008

Yesterday I received an SMS from a petitioner from Henan called Wang Jinlan. She was illegally locked up in a black jail run by a local government at the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street near Taoranting park.

It’s in no way an exaggeration to call this a black jail. Dozens of petitioners are locked up there and the government has put hired thugs in charge of them. What makes this different from a regular jail is that the petitioners who are imprisoned here are completely innocent. They were petitioning in a normal way when they were taken from the State Bureau for Letters and Visits, the Supreme People’s Court and other letters and visits departments, and brought here to be locked up without any legal process.

I plan to expose these black jails. Today, I went there again. I hadn’t got far down the alley to the south of the Youth Hotel, when I saw a tall guard from the black jail sitting on a stool chatting with some others. Almost at the same time, they recognized me.

On the corner, several dozen meters from the black jail, is the entrance to No. 62 Middle School. From the school entrance, I checked out the lay of the land, looking for a good place to take photographs and contacting a friend. Li Yongbin the lawyer was hurrying over.

I waited until nearly 6 o’clock. Li was stuck in traffic and was still a long way off. I was afraid it was about to get dark so I decided to go in alone. A journalist friend was at the No. 62 Middle School entrance as back-up.

Before I reached the entrance to the black jail, four or five guards were already waiting. As soon as I got close, they demanded to know what I was doing. I said I was looking for someone. They told me to leave right away. One of them, wearing a red jacket, looked familiar. If my memory is right, this person is Deputy Director Liu Fengxiang of the Kaifeng Bureau of Letters and Visits. Three years ago he and a group of other people picking up petitioners beat me up in an alley in front of the State Bureau of Letters and Visits. I hadn’t thought I’d bump into him here. I said, “You’re illegally detaining petitioners. It’s illegal.” Director Liu said, ” Who says we’re detaining people? They’re all here voluntarily.” I said, “Well, for example, is Wang Jinlan voluntary?” He said, “How do you know she’s not?”

I fished out my cell phone and was about to call Wang Jinlan who was locked inside. Director Liu snatched my phone. A fist hit my face and he yelled at me to fuck off. He said, “This is government business. It doesn’t concern you.” I later learnt that Director Liu has been the fiercest in beating petitioners. Many petitioners are afraid of him and they all know the guards all call him “Director Liu.” I suppose this is the only kind of person from the Bureau of Letters and Visits who’s suitable to come and work here.

I refused to leave. The tall guy next to Director Liu violently shoved, punched and slapped me, pushing me towards the entrance to the No. 62 Middle School. The bare-chested guy from yesterday rushed towards me carrying a chain and lock, bellowing, but he was held back by the others. I shouted to the students who were coming out of the school gate, “Please remember this, there’s a black jail just next to you locking up innocent petitioners.”

Wang Jinlan sent me an SMS from inside saying, “They won’t let me out. There are 21 people in here. Just now a woman from a steelworks in Luoyang called Liu Cuihua had a rib broken by local officials. She was brought here wearing an infusion needle. Now she’s in the corridor.” Earlier, she sent an SMS warning me not to come under any circumstances. “It’s dangerous!” She said the local government had hired gangsters as hired thugs. They’d be paid 1,000 for a light beating and 3,000 yuan for a heavy beating. I think the bare-chested guy from Beijing is probably the most ferocious and ruthly of the hired thugs.

At the entrance to the No. 62 Middle School, the guards had discovered my journalist friend. The tall guard grabbed her mobile phone and violently smashed it on the ground. I told them to get away. Several guards held me there, at the same time anxiously phoning the local government and demanding that they hurry up and take Wang Jinlan away.

Things calmed down for a while. I mildly asked the tall guy who had just been hitting me what his job was. Surprisingly, he yelled at me, “What do you want to know about me for? If you’ve got any ability then take a civil service exam. When you’re an official you can change this!” I said, “I spoke to you calmly. Why are you angry?”

After ten minutes or so, the local authorities arrived and Wang Jinlan was brought out. The person who came to get her was a court official. At this point, both Wang Jinlan and I were both free. The guards wanted an excuse to extricated themselves from the situation and were anxious for us to leave quickly. She said she had gone to the Supreme People’s Court to make a normal petition and had just finished filling in a form when she was brought here. She hadn’t broken any law.

I asked Wang Jinlan if she was willing to go with the court official. She said she was as long as the local government was willing to discuss things properly. The court official promised that nothing more would happen to her and promised to discuss her case properly. And so we parted.

When I got back to my office and calmed down, I started to feel very sad. Not because I had been hit and it wasn’t just because of those hired thugs. It was because of the long existence of these black jails. This is a contradiction in the state system. Many of the people who used to be locked up in custody and repatriation centers were petitioners. After 2003, the custody and repatriation centers didn’t exist anymore, and the black jails sprang up to take their place.

The Henan provincial government’s letters and visits departments paid off hotels that were willing to forget about principles for the sake of profit. They employed gangsters as hired hands as well as arranging jobs for their own relatives and created these black jails. There are many other similar black jails around the State Bureau of Letters and Visits. A standard room in the Youth Hotel costs 120 yuan for normal customers. But six or seven petitioners can be locked up in one room and the local governments give the hotel 150 yuan a day for each petitioner.

I’m wondering if I should try to understand them more. When the tall guy told me that if I had the ability I should take the civil service exam, become an official and change the situation, I can understand that he wasn’t happy with this system. But when I think of so many innocent and weak people being beaten up, sometimes to the point of being crippled, I just can’t take standards of human dignity so low. In some ways, this is far more terrible than the black kilns. It has to change. I will do my best to shine some light on this, even if it’s only a little. I believe that one day, eventually, this dreadful corner will disappear.

September 22, 2008

On September 26, Teng Biao, Zhou Shuguang and I went to the black jail, but it was already getting dark when we arrived so we didn’t take any action. We just had a quick look at the terrain. A guard appeared to have noticed us.

Today, I received a phone call from a woman who said four middle school students had been taken to the black jail and she hoped I could help get them out. They have to go to school tomorrow. They’re 13 or 14, one boy and two girls. They came to Beijing with their parent(s) to petition and were taken to the black jail in the Youth Hotel. They’d sent an SMS to their family using a mobile phone that a petitioner in the jail had kept hidden.

We agreed to go to the Youth Hotel at noon tomorrow. I hope some friends will go with me and at least get the middle school students out. (October 4. To be continued.)

At midday on October 5, I set off with Zhou Shuguang and Zhang Yadong. Before that I received a phone call from a petitioner and agreed to meet her at one o’clock outside the entrance to the Youth Hotel. A netizen called Zuoqio also phoned, saying they were already at the Youth Hotel. This time I was prepared for the worst and prepared quite well.

The first person I saw was the woman. She’s from Henan. She believes the police didn’t investigate the killer in a murder case, so she started petitioning. Because of her petitioning, she spent a year doing reeducation through labor. I suppose she felt petitioning was difficult and dangerous, so this time she brought the children with her, trying to get the higher authorities to take it seriously. Presumably the children carried banners, so the police sent them here. She said she’d just seen Director Liu and some others coming out and going to the Huapu supermarket across the road.

We joined Zuoqiao and two others with him and went towards the back entrance to the Youth Hotel. At the window, we asked the guard on duty for the four children. He said, “The local government already took them away this morning.” We said we wanted to go in and look. He refused, but his tone was noticeably more calm. At this point, some petitioners were brought out by the local government. We asked about the four children and they said they had already been taken away this morning.

The entire atmosphere was completely different to the last two times I went there. On the previous two occasions, the guards started hitting people immediately. This time the attitude was unusually mild and the hired thugs were nowhere to be seen. The words I wrote on my blog probably had some effect. Perhaps it’s because I announced that I was going to go there today that they hastily took the children away.

There are at least four black jails in Beijing where Henan province locks up petitioners: the Youth Hotel, the Fenglong Youth Hostel, the Juyuan Hotel and the Jingyuan Hotel. These black jails are just like the custody and repatriation centers of the past and they’ve become an industry. If we take the Youth Hotel as an example, the general situation is this: the man surnamed Liu and another surnamed Yin rent a room from the Youth Hotel. They employ some hired thugs and they’re entrusted by the Henan representative office in Beijing to grab petitioners from the Jiujingzhuang shelter and bring them here. The county governments come and pick them up and pay 150 yuan a day for each person.

Many thanks to friends for their care and support! We will go back there again. And I hope that more and more citizens will care about this dark corner.

October 5, 2008

And that, for now, is all of Xu Zhigang’s account of his visits to the Youth Hotel. Here are the rest of the photos I took of the area at the end of September. As I said earlier, sorry, no action. I didn’t want any.

For a vivid personal account of a recent mass petition (and subsequent detention) involving parents of kidnapped children see Oiwan Lam’s translation at Global Voices.

Front entrance to the Youth Hotel on Taiping Street

Side road to the south of the hotel - at the end of the street is the gate to the No. 62 Middle School

Back alley behind the hotel facing south. The side road is ahead, to the left.

This year's Nobel peace prize could be awarded to a Chinese dissident to highlight China's human rights record in the wake of the Olympic Games, according to experts who closely follow the workings of the award.

"The prize will go this year to a Chinese dissident and I believe the most likely [recipient] will be Hu Jia, perhaps together with his wife [Zeng Jinyan]," said Stein Toennesson, director of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, and a close observer of the peace prize. "He has become the most well known Chinese dissident now and it has been a very long time since anyone [related to China] has won the prize." The last occasion was the Dalai Lama in 1989.

Experts said the Norwegian Nobel committee, the secretive five-strong body that awards the prize yearly, would see the passing of the Olympic Games as an opportunity to highlight China's human rights record, especially in a year marking the 60th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights.

"There was a lot of repression during the Olympic Games. Now is a golden opportunity to underline that repression is unacceptable," said Janne Haaland Matlary, a professor of international relations at the University of Oslo, and a previous candidate to be a member of the Nobel committee.

Since the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, "it has become more and more difficult to criticise China as it became more forceful and powerful," said Toennesson. "It has also been an argument not to disturb the run-up to the Olympics because it will be of momentous importance not only for the regime, but also for the Chinese people."
There is a moral dimension to this ongoing oppression which ought to give the Chinese Government pause for thought. Governments that lock up people who don't agree with them (we are not talking terrorism here for goodness sake!) tend to have limited shelf-lives, never achieve the moral authority and acceptance in the eyes of the international community that they crave and ultimately implode on themselves when the final vestiges of their legitimacy disappear. It may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow or in 20 years, but one day it shall if they carry on like this.

Hu would be a worthy winner and it would be interesting to see how and if the Communist authorities would react. I think it would be highly embarrassing for them that Hu is currently in prison on a pretty flimsy pretext. Perhaps they ought to think about releasing him PDQ?

The detainees, including a 79-year-old woman, are from the industrial city of Liuzhou in Guangxi Autonomous Region. They have been held by the local police since Sept. 10, when they were arrested in Beijing before they could carry out any protests.

The petitioners had flown to Beijing two days earlier, from the city of Shenzhen, and hid in an apartment in northern Beijing. They intended to seek redress in four separate cases of property seizure or destruction, a very common complaint in China. But dozens of plainclothes police officers from Guangxi arrested them, with the help of some Beijing police officers, when they emerged from the apartment.

One petitioner, Huang Liuhong, used her cellphone to report that she and a sister were being driven back to Liuzhou. She said they were stripped by a female officer to prevent them from trying to escape.

In a telephone interview from Liuzhou on Wednesday, another of Ms. Huang’s sisters, Huang Liuqing, said their 79-year-old mother was being held in a government villa in the county of Xiangshui. She said the government sent a car daily to take her to see her mother, whose chest had been injured while she was in police custody.

“My mother’s health is not well,” she said.

“There were dozens of male police officers around,” she said, recounting what her mother and sisters had told her about the stripping. “It was an absolute humiliation for them. My mother was psychologically devastated when she saw with her own eyes her daughters being stripped naked.”

Huang Liuqing said her family members were taken to a hotel run by the military and interrogated for four hours that night by police officers. They were then charged with disturbing the social order in Beijing, she said.

The group has been split up and no one knows exactly where the other petitioners are, including the baby, Ms. Huang said. According to her mother, she said, the police took away cellphones and identification cards.

Police officers in Liuzhou and Guangxi have declined to comment. An official in Beijing acknowledged last week that the petitioners had been arrested by police officers from the south.

Before the Olympic Games, China lied, claiming it would allow protests in three parks in Beijing. But the government has not granted any protest permits.

The group arrived in China on Sunday and had intended to distribute the Bibles to people in the city, Klein told the AP in a telephone interview while still at the airport.

"I heard that there's freedom of religion in China, so why is there a problem for us to bring Bibles?" Klein said. "We had over 300 copies and customs took all of them from us."

The move comes as China hosts the Olympics in Beijing, where false media reports last year claimed Bibles would be banned from the games. The state-run China Daily reported last month that 10,000 bilingual copies of the Bible would be distributed in the Olympic Village, which houses athletes and media.

Bibles are printed under the supervision of the Communist government. The officially atheistic country only allows them to be used in government-sanctioned churches and in some big hotels catering to foreigners.

A woman who was on duty at Kunming airport's customs office confirmed over the telephone that 315 Bibles were found in the passengers' checked baggage.

The officer, who would only give her last name, Xiao, denied confiscating the Bibles. She said authorities were just "taking care" of them and provided no further details. She later said she was not authorized to speak to the media and referred questions to the national customs headquarters in Beijing, which did not answer phones on Sunday.

"We're not selling them; we give them free to the people," Klein said. "We didn't come to cause trouble, we just came to bring Bibles to help out the Chinese Christians."

The Bibles were printed in Chinese, he said.

Klein said the customs officers had told him that they could each have one Bible for personal use and not more than that. He said the officers had videotaped them and were insisting that they leave the airport.

"We don't want to go without taking those books. It cost us a lot of money to bring them here," Klein said. "They're saying that it's illegal to bring the Bibles in and that if we wanted to, we had to apply ahead of time for permission."

China faces routine criticism for its human rights violations and its repression of religious freedom. Religious practice is heavily regulated by the Communist Party, with worship allowed only in party-controlled churches, temples and mosques, while those gathering outside face harassment, arrest and terms in labor camps or prison.

A Chinese Christian activist was detained Aug. 10, the opening weekend of the Olympics, on his way to a church service attended by President Bush in Beijing. A rights group said later that the activist, Hua Huiqi, a leader of the unofficial Protestant church in Beijing, had escaped from police and was in hiding.

More than 60 crimes can carry the death penalty in China

The Chinese authorities put to death at least 470 people last year, but probably killed many more, human rights group Amnesty International has said.

Amnesty said the hidden extent of executions in China, where figures are secret, might mean the Olympic host was behind the bulk of them worldwide.

"The veil of secrecy surrounding the death penalty must be lifted," it said.

At least 1,252 people are known to have been executed in 24 countries in 2007, a slight drop on the previous year.

Just five countries - China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US - were responsible for 88% of known executions in the world, Amnesty said.

About 3,347 people were sentenced to death in 51 nations last year and up to 27,500 people are now estimated to be on death row.

Swift justice

In its annual report on the death penalty, Amnesty International said China had executed more than any country last year. While there were 470 confirmed executions, the real figure was likely run into thousands, Amnesty said.

"As the world's biggest executioner, China gets the 'gold medal' for global executions," said the organisation's UK director, Kate Allen.

Many governments claim that executions take place with public support - people therefore have a right to know what is being done in their name Amnesty International

More than 60 crimes can carry the death penalty in China, including tax fraud, stealing VAT receipts, damaging electric power facilities, selling counterfeit medicine, embezzlement, accepting bribes and drug offences, Amnesty said.

Those sentenced to death are usually shot, but some provinces are introducing lethal injections, which the government says is more humane.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, in Beijing, says justice is usually swift - most of those sentenced to death are executed only weeks after they are found guilty.

GLOBAL EXECUTIONS IN 2007 Minimum of 1,252 people were executed in 24 countries At least 3,347 sentenced to death in more than 50 countries Up to 27,500 on death row China: at least 470, many more estimated Iran: at least 317 people, up from 177 in 2006 Saudi Arabia: at least 143, up from 39 Pakistan: at least 135, up from 82

The death penalty has popular support in China, our correspondent says, and the government has been attempting to reform the system.

Last year, it decreed that all cases involving the death penalty had to be referred to the Supreme Court. According to state media, this led to a 10% fall in executions in the first five months of 2007.

Amnesty urged the International Olympic Committee and athletes to press for greater openness about executions during the Olympic Games in Beijing this August.

"The secretive use of the death penalty must stop: the veil of secrecy surrounding the death penalty must be lifted," it added.

"Many governments claim that executions take place with public support. People therefore have a right to know what is being done in their name."

UN resolution

Iran was second to China with 317 known executions during 2007, the report said, followed by Saudi Arabia on 143, Pakistan on 135 and the US on 42.

Amnesty said the totals had risen alarmingly in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but that worldwide they showed a drop - down to 1,252 from 1,591 the previous year.

Iran was second to China, with 317 known executions in 2007

The executions in Iran included the stoning to death of a man for adultery, and the execution of three people who were teenagers aged between 13 and 16 at the time of their arrests, it added.

In Saudi Arabia, those killed included a child offender aged 15 or 16 at the time of his detention, and an Egyptian man who was beheaded for "sorcery" and adultery - one of at least 76 foreigners executed by the Gulf kingdom.

Despite the statistics, Amnesty welcomed the wider trend toward the global abolition of the death penalty, noting that in December 2007, the UN General Assembly had voted by a large majority in favour of a resolution calling for an end to capital punishment. "The taking of life by the state is one of the most drastic acts a government can undertake. We are urging all governments to follow the commitments made at the UN and abolish the death penalty once and for all," it added.

What used to be called the Olympics are likely this summer to become the Paramilitary Games. China is planning to deploy more than 94,000 security personnel at the Beijing celebration in August, which means that uniformed and plain-clothes operatives will outnumber the 10,500 athletes by nearly nine to one.

Leading what will be the biggest security effort the world has ever seen is the People's Armed Police, a 660,000-strong militia force, which has been involved in the crackdown on Tibetan demonstrators in Lhasa. The PAP is also believed to have provided the squads of blue and white tracksuited paramilitaries who formed the controversial phalanx of guards for the Olympic torch as it made its chaotic way across London, Paris and San Francisco last week. On Thursday, the People's Armed Police News reported that the PAP force was told to prevent any security threats that could upset the Games. The paper issued a "political mobilisation order" to PAP troops telling them to prepare for an arduous time ensuring order and control before and during the Games.

Beijing is worried that activists from abroad, who have disrupted the journey of the Olympic torch relay, will also stage protests inside China over Tibet, Darfur, human rights and other issues before and during the Games. As a result, security experts forecast that the PAP's ranks will swell further. There has already been high-profile shows of strength by the militia in Beijing, public display exercises to show its carefully honed organisation.

The willingness of the torch's minders over the past week to weigh in and protect the flame – even on foreign soil where the guards have no jurisdiction – introduced the force's strict approach to a wider, worldwide audience for the first time and reflects the way security forces in China can pretty much do what they like on their own territory. About 20 government agencies – from the world's largest standing army, the two-million strong People's Liberation Army, to the fire service – will be involved in the security operation for the Olympics, supported by thousands of volunteers recruited from military and police academies. Organisers in Beijing insist they have spent less on security than the Athens Games in 2004, glossing over the argument that the last Olympics were considered a special case because they were the first to be held after the 11 September attacks on the United States. Even then, security personnel in Greece numbered between 50,000 and 70,000 operatives, far fewer than will be ready for action in Beijing.

The worldwide relay passed through Buenos Aires on Friday night with a comparatively smooth ride. Disruption had been expected but a tossed water balloon was the stiffest challenge faced by the heavy police guard. But the path ahead remains rocky. India has severely cut back the route and warned Chinese officials that it will not attempt to stop peaceful protests when the torch arrives. A similar stance has been taken in Indonesia. Japan has also mapped out a strategy, banning the PAP force from running beside its own police officers when it passes through Nagano. And all of that precedes the most controversial passage ofall: an ascent of Mount Everest in May followed by a tour of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the scene of rioting in March.

The focus on Chinese state television for the past week has been on the larger crowds of well-wishers who lined the route of the torch relay and showed nothing of the protests, although commentators did mention "vile" disruptive elements. After disturbances in Paris, the communist newspaper The People's Daily led with stirring reports of a disabled athlete who fought to keep the "sacred flame" alight against the threat of Tibetan "splittists". In China, where all areas of media activity are tightly controlled by the government, where dissent is forbidden and can result in a jail sentence, the Olympic torch relay has been portrayed as an outstanding success so far. The coverage on the official news agency, Xinhua, has shown mostly smiling athletes and civic leaders passing the torch. The news reports quote leaders and passers-by wishing Beijing well.Last summer, dozens of security guards with metal pipes beat up a group of construction workers at the National Stadium, centrepiece of the Olympic Games, who were having a cigarette break in breach of a strict no smoking rule. More recently, Beijing claimed to have uncovered a plot by Muslim separatists in Xinjiang to sabotage the celebrations with suicide bombings and kidnappings.

" ... the young man surnamed Yang was expelled from Shangdong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine last Saturday simply because he has diabetes, local media reported.

Yang has had diabetes for four years and with good treatment, he never missed any classes.

"I even successfully finished the military training before I started university," he said. But Yang admitted he did not write down he had diabetes on his university application to avoid being treated differently and looked down by others."  Link