China Abolishes Labor Camps – Or Pretends To, Anyway

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced this November that it is closing its forced labor camp system, which it uses to persecute people for their beliefs and opinions.  That’s great, right?

It would be, except that the labor camps haven’t gone away.  They’ve simply changed their names.

This crafty trick isn’t fooling Amnesty International, which released a report this week called “‘Changing the Soup but Not the Medicine?’ – Abolishing Re-Education Through Labor in China.”

Amnesty International said that some labor camps just change the sign on the building so it’s no longer called a labor camp, the Epoch Times reported.  The new sign might say it’s a drug rehabilitation center, for example.

Inside, meanwhile, the same prisoners are tormented in the same ways.

Other labor camps actually do get closed.  Then the prisoners are moved to another location, such as a brainwashing center, and the torture continues, Amnesty International said in the report according to the Epoch Times.

The CCP has used labor camps for decades to punish people who didn’t agree with its line of thinking.  Today, it uses them to torture practitioners of Falun Gong, a traditional meditation practice, and other spiritual believers as well as petitioners who complain to the CCP about injustices.

“The closure of RTL [re-education through labor] camps will not bring long-term relief or justice if the policies driving the human rights violations do not change,” the Amnesty International report stated. “Chinese authorities need to abolish all forms of arbitrary detention and stop punishing individuals for doing nothing more than peacefully exercising their human rights.”

Why did the communist regime bother to abolish labor camps if they’re going to continue abusing people?

“The CCP is forced to change the name of the labor camps due to their notorious reputation in and out of China,” Erping Zhang, spokesperson for the Falun Dafa Information Center, told the Epoch Times.

Apparently, the international community has successfully pressured the CCP into closing its labor camps.  Now who’s going to pressure it to close its new “drug rehabilitation centers”?

Sources: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/404750-new-name-old-abuses/

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA17/042/2013/en