Human rights group urges China to release dissident

“This Olympics absolutely does not reflect justice or human rights,” said Sun Yu-lien, an executive member of Taiwan International Human Rights Solidarity Center. “We strongly urge leaders of the Chinese government to fulfill the promise that China made in order to win the right to host the Olympic Games — to improve its human rights record.”

Several human rights activists, including a lawyer, a journalist and a university professor, held a press conference in Taipei to call for China to release the prominent Chinese human rights dissident Hu Jia on bail for medical treatment, based on humanitarian concerns.

Hu, who suffers from cirrhosis of the liver, was sentenced on April 2 to three and a half years in prison and banned from political activism for one year for “inciting subversion of state power” by posting articles on the Internet and giving interviews to foreign journalists. The 34-year-old activist, one of the most vocal in China, rose to prominence as a campaigner for the rights of AIDS patients.

Amid growing criticism worldwide of China’s crackdown in Tibet, Hu’s case has drawn much international attention, with critics saying that his detention and conviction were part of a campaign to silence dissents ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Hu’s wife, Zeng Jinyan, who has a newborn baby, has been under house arrest since her husband was arrested in December last year.

Yang Chunlin, another human rights activist, was given a maximum sentence of five years in jail last month on subversion charges after he organized a campaign to collect 40,000 signatures for a petition that stated: “We want human rights, not the Olympics.”

Huang Mou, director of the Chang Fo-Chuan Center for the Study of Human Rights at Soochow University, said that it is incomprehensible why the Chinese government would expend so much effort on two completely harmless people whose only concerns are “the truth” and “human rights.”

“What China did has violated every moral standard, “ Huang said. “China cannot expect to be seen as a great civilized country when it is showing disregard for the universal values of freedom of speech and human rights.”

Chow Fu-mei, an executive member of the Association of Taiwan Journalists, said that Hu Jia’s case is “a trial of the conscience of the 1.3 billion Chinese people.”

“Taiwan will never shrink from any effort to rescue Hu Jia because we believe that justice will be restored if we try hard enough,” she said.

Lin Feng-jeng, executive director of the Judicial Reform Foundation, said the foundation hoped that the press conference would be just a start in a series of efforts to support those detained and jailed in China.

“Let’s hope today’s Taiwan will be tomorrow’s China,” he said.

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