WASHINGTON POST / AP: China will stop handing down labor camp sentences this year under a system that allowed police to lock up government critics and other defendants for up to four years without trial, the country’s top law enforcement official said Monday.
The move would be a key step in reforming China’s judicial system, though details remained unclear, including what would become of existing “reeducation through labor” camps and their current inmates and whether this presages a new system involving court hearings before defendants can be sent to such facilities…
The labor camp system originally was used to detain accused counterrevolutionaries or other critics of the Communist government, but was later expanded to punish prostitutes, drug addicts and other minor criminals. Authorities sentenced large numbers of Falun Gong adherents to the camps after banning the meditation movement as an evil cult in the late 1990s… (more)
