This piece of news was published in Human Rights Watch on the 6th May of 2016.
The news is about the negligence of political prisoners' health in China. Guo Feixiong and Gao Yu's are feared to be sick and with really poor medical conditions. Authorities know about this but still they let them unattended, even when China is a party in the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Sophie Richardson, China's director, informs against the cruelty and the human right's violation that prisoners are suffering in Chinese prisons, reporting that they let them get sick and some of them even die in without appropiate health care.
Guo Feixiong (whose real name is Yang Maodong) was accused for gathering crowds against social order, as the article reads, because he took part in more than one demonstration standing up for freedom of speech. He is serving a six-year penalty and when his sister Yang Maoping, a doctor herself, went to visit him, he noticed he was sick. Even if both Guo and her sister asked the officers for a medical check for Guo, they refused.
Guo Feixiong
On the other hand, Gao Yu is a 72-year-old woman who's a journalist and has been imprisoned more than once for leaking risky documents that compromised the government and, specially, the Chinese Communist Party. Gao suffers from many illneses and has had a turbulent medical health that has only been aggravated by the restrictive control of the Chinese authorities, even if she's in medical parole in her house.
Gao Yu
The news also reports another case, Cao Shunli's, a grass roots activist that died of a coma after telling her lawyer that officers wouldn't grant her medical treatment even when it was possible that she had tuberculosis and liver disease.
Also, monk Tenzin Delek Rinpoche died in prison in 2015 after being there for 13 years with reported bad health conditions and torture.
China has been criticized in the Convention Against Torture because of this matter. Letting prisoners die of medical negligence violates the rule 24 of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, so their actions are against human rights.
Personally, I think that it's awful that Chinese authorities send anyone who speaks against them to prison, but what is worse is that they purposely let them die in prison. I find it such a lack of humanity to have signed in favor of the defense of human rights while still allowing a torture like this. It's really disappointing and we shouldn't let this happen, anywhere in the world.
VOCABULARY
parole: the release of a person from prison before the end of the sentence imposed, with a promise or condition that no more crimes will be commited.
grass roots: the common or ordinary people, as constrasted with the leadership or elite of a political party, social organization, etc.
lymph: a clear, yellowish fluid in the blood that contains special blood cells that fight infection.
No comments:
Post a Comment