History
Institutions similar to re-education through labor facilities, but called "new life schools" or "loafers' camps", existed in the early 1950s, although they did not become official until the anti-rightist campaigns in 1957 and 1958. A report by Human Rights in China (HRIC) states that re-education through labor was first used by the Communist Party of China in 1955 to punish counter-revolutionaries, and in 1957 was officially adopted into law to be implemented by the Ministry of Public Security. The law allowed police to sentence both minor offenders and "counter-revolutionaries" or "anti-socialist elements" to incarceration in labor camps without the right to a judicial hearing or trial, and did not allow judicial review to take place until after the punishment was being enforced. In the beginning there were no limits to the length for which detainees could be sentenced, and it was not until 1979 that a maximum sentence of four years (three years' sentence plus one-year extension) was set. In 1983, the management and implementation of the re-education through labor system was passed from the Ministry of Public Security to the Ministry of Justice.
When Falun Gong was banned in mainland China in 1999, re-education through labor became a common punishment for practitioners. Some human rights groups claim that as many as 10,000 Falun Gong members were detained in between 1999 and 2002, with as many as 5,000 detained in 2001 alone. More recent estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong adherents are imprisoned in China, with some sources estimating up to half of the official reeducation through labor camp population is Falun Gong practitioners. In some labor camps, Falun Gong practitioners make up the majority population.
In the past decade, there have been numerous calls for the system to be reformed or replaced. As early as 1997, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) called for China to allow judicial control over detentions; in 2000, the UN Committee Against Torture recommended that all forms of administrative detention, including re-education through labor, be abolished; in 2004, the WGAD called for the establishment of rights to due process and counsel for individuals detained; and in 2005, the Special Rapporteur on Torture called for the outright abolition of re-education through labor. The prominent deaths of two inmates in spring 2003 prompted many calls within China for reform of the system, but reform did not happen immediately, though The China Daily reported that there was "general consensus" that reform was needed. In March 2007, however, the Chinese government did announce that it would abolish the re-education through labor system and replace it with a more lenient set of laws. According to the proposal, the maximum sentence would be lowered from four years to 18 months; re-education centers would be renamed "correction centers" and have their fences and gates removed. A month later, Chongqing municipality passed a law allowing lawyers to offer legal counsel in re-education through labor cases.
Many human rights groups, however, doubted the efficacy of the proposed reforms, saying that the new laws would only help minor criminals and not help political prisoners, and that the reforms would not actually abolish the re-education through labor system. The Laogai Research Foundation stated that lowering the maximum length of detention and changing the names of the detention facilities would not constitute a "fundamental change". Nine months after the declaration that the laws would be rewritten, the re-education through labor system had not been abolished; in December 2007, a group of academics drafted an open letter to the government calling for an end to the system. During the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, there were reports that some individuals applying for permits to protest were detained without trial; of these, some were sentenced to re-education through labor. In the United Nations Human Rights Council's September 2008 Universal Periodic Review of the People's Republic of China, re-education through labor was listed as an "urgent human rights concern," and as of February 2009 there remains a large number of active facilities.
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