CNN: Amnesty International: China abuse prisoners (Excerpt)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Amnesty International's release of its 40th annual human rights report on Wednesday showed little improvement in global human rights conditions.

Amnesty International Senior Deputy Executive Director Curt Goering spoke with CNN Anchor Colleen McEdwards and accused China and the United States of being significant abusers of prisoners.

McEDWARDS: I wonder if we could start with China. What did you find about its human rights record?

GOERING: Well, China is one of those countries where when one speaks of the global human rights situation, one has to discuss the situation in China because it is really an unfortunate one. There are literally tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience, many of them members of the Falun Gong movement -- the spiritual and exercise movement -- who've been detained, and many of them in re-education-through-labor camps for doing nothing more than practicing their beliefs, non-violent exercise of their right to freedom of association.

We find in Chinese police stations, in Chinese jails across the country and in numerous provinces torture on a systematic and too often widespread scale.

McEDWARDS: Mr. Goering, has there been any change in that? Was China any better in this most recent report, which was last year, than it was in previous years?

GOERING: Well, in China we've seen in the last year a sustained major crackdown on virtually all kinds of dissent. So that situation hasn't improved at all. We can talk about a fewer number of executions in China although China still carries out the largest number of executions of any country in the world, over a thousand last year. And while this is on the decline, it still is at an alarmingly high level, especially when one considers that many of these verdicts have in effect been decided in advance before the trial.

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http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/05/30/amnesty.cnna/index.html

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