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VI. Political Prisoner Database

The Commission made the CECC Political Prisoner Database (PPD) globally accessible via the Internet in November 2004. The PPD serves as a unique and powerful resource for individuals, educational institutions, NGOs, and governments that wish to research political and religious imprisonment in China or advocate on behalf of prisoners. The Commission routinely uses the database for its own advocacy work, and to prepare summaries of information about political and religious prisoners for Members of Congress and senior Administration officials. The Commission uses the database to alert the public about upcoming dates of parole eligibility, and about dates when sentences expire and prisoners are due for release. The PPD received approximately 150,000 online requests for prisoner information since last October.

The PPD is designed to allow anyone with Internet access to query the database and download prisoner data without providing personal information. Users also have the option to create a user account, which allows them to save, edit, or reuse queries. A user-specified ID and password is the only information required to set up a user account. The PPD does not download or install any software or Web cookies to a user's computer.

The PPD currently allows users to conduct queries on 19 categories of prisoner information.¹ The Commission intends to upgrade the PPD software and interface to make it possible to search and retrieve more categories of prisoner information, such as the names and locations of the courts that convicted political and religious prisoners, and the dates of key events in the legal process such as sentencing and decision upon appeal. The Commission also plans future upgrades that will make it possible for users to navigate between reports on political imprisonment in the CECC Virtual Academy and records of political and religious prisoners in the PPD. The Virtual Academy is accessible on the Commission's Web site.

Each prisoner's record describes the type of human rights violation by Chinese authorities that led to his or her detention. These include violations of the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of expression, including the freedom to advocate peaceful social or political change, and to criticize government policy or government officials. Many records feature a short summary of the case that includes basic details about the political or religious imprisonment and the legal process leading to imprisonment. Users may download information about prisoners from the PPD as Adobe Acrobat files or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

As of September 2006, the PPD contained more than 3,900 individual case records of political and religious imprisonment in China. The Dui Hua Foundation, based in San Francisco, and the Tibet Information Network, based in London, shared their extensive experience and data on political and religious prisoners in China with the Commission to help establish the database.² The Dui Hua Foundation continues to do so. The Commission also relies on its own staff research for prisoner information, as well as on information provided by NGOs and other groups that specialize in promoting human rights and opposing political and religious imprisonment.

The PPD is accessible on the Internet at http://ppd.cecc.gov. The Commission Web site contains instructions on how to use the PPD.