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Plans to legalise disappearances speak volumes about the mindset of the Chinese state
Red state sponsored terror.China spends millions on burnishing its image abroad, but the news that it is seeking to legalise the kind of detention experienced by Ai Weiwei earlier this year once again points to the darker corners of the Chinese state. Ai was detained for 43 days before anyone (including his wife Lu Qing) was even allowed to see him, a fact which lawyers both inside and outside China argued passionately was not legal. China often likes to defend itself by referring to the rule of law, but in this very high profile case the governments spokesmen found it embarrassingly difficult defending the excesses of its security establishment which, quite literally, is a law unto itself. The solution now being mooted to this problem to amend Chinese law to make the current indefensible practices legal says something very disturbing about the current mindset of the Chinese state. The thought, presumably, is that the next time the secret police force disappear someone like Ai Weiwei or the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, it can bat away international and domestic disapproval by citing the relevant new sections of the modified Criminal Procedure Law. Posted by: Eohippus Phater7165 2011-08-31 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=328987 |