“Repression and coercion markedly increased” in Communist China during the year 2015, according to a new U.S. State Department report, which describes organizations and individuals that suffered egregious attacks on their religious, civil, and political rights.
“The crackdown on the legal community was particularly severe,” said the report, which is titled: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Lawyers and law firms were targeted for harassment and detention if they dared to defend clients against China’s barbarian practices, said the report. Hundreds of lawyers were “interrogated, investigated, and in many cases detained in secret locations for months,” the report revealed.
Last September, Breitbart News reported that China’s most prominent Christian lawyer, Zhang Kai, who defended and gave legal counsel to a number of Christian churches throughout the country, especially against the government’s cross-removal campaign, had been carried off by police and placed in secretive detention.
Knowing that it could cost him his legal career and even his freedom, the Chinese attorney battled the Communist Party and successfully defended numerous Christian churches that wished to keep visible crosses on top of their buildings.
Also, the State Department found that despite China’s supposed relaxation of its draconian one-child policy, “forced abortion, sterilization and other abuses were still commonly used to enforce China’s population control policy.”
The report states that among China’s many human rights abuses is “a coercive birth-limitation policy that, despite the lifting of one-child-per-family restrictions, in some cases resulted in forced abortion (sometimes at advanced stages of pregnancy).”
In a remarkable revelation, the report stated that the number of abortions in China is nearly double the commonly quoted figure of 13 million per year. The Chinese government has repeatedly reported the figure of 13 million abortions a year, but the State Department places the number at 23 million, or a full 10 million higher than official statistics.
It is unclear how many of the 23 million annual abortions are requested by mothers and how many are mandated by the State and carried out under coercion.
Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and an expert on Chinese family policy, told Breitbart News that “13 million abortions a year was already an incomprehensible statistic. But to add another 10 million is truly staggering, incomprehensibly tragic.”
Twenty-three million abortions a year “comes to 63,013 abortions a day, 2625 abortions an hour, 43 per minute,” she added.
The report also found that “female infanticide, gender-biased abortions, and the abandonment and neglect of baby girls remained problems due to the traditional preference for sons and the birth-limitation policy.”
The State Department Report is significant not only for revealing the startling increase in the number of abortions performed, but also for underscoring the brutal methods of enforcement.
“The country’s birth-limitation policies retained harshly coercive elements in law and practice,” the report says, and the government exerts “intense pressure” upon police to enforce local birth-limitation quotas.
The report also said that Chinese authorities continue “to censor and tightly control public discourse on the internet and in print and other media.”
Other human rights abuses documented during the year included “alleged extrajudicial killings; executions without due process; prolonged illegal detentions at unofficial holding facilities known as ‘black jails’; torture and coerced confessions of prisoners; detention and harassment of lawyers who took on ‘sensitive’ cases, journalists, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others whose actions the authorities deemed unacceptable.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome.
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