Access to Justice

The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) government has included focus on ethnic minority women in recent legislation on women's rights, but its impact may be limited given a track record across China of weak implementation of provisions to protect both women's rights and ethnic minority rights. The IMAR implementing measures for the national Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Women (IMAR implementing measures), adopted November 14, 2008, and effective March 1, 2009, include three articles with provisions on ethnic minority women.

The Chinese government's anti-trafficking response remains inadequate and noncompliant with international standards one year after the State Council issued the National Action Plan on Combating Trafficking in Women and Children (2008-2012) on December 13, 2007, (English version via the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-region's China Office, or UNIAP China).

According to a September 22 Takungpao article and an October 16 New York Times (NYT) article, Chinese lawyers in Beijing and the provinces of Hebei and Henan reported that officials have pressured them not to take cases related to milk powder tainted with the toxic chemical melamine, the widespread sale of which was revealed to the public in September 2008. The major dairy producer Sanlu has been at the center of the scandal, which has led to the deaths of at least four infants and sickened at least 53,000 children, according to the NYT article. While many lawyers have agreed to handle such cases, Chinese courts have been reluctant to accept them.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government continued this year to force students to participate in controversial "work-study" programs, but have restricted students in junior high school and lower grades from participating in cotton-picking activities. According to a September 19 Tianshan Net article, the XUAR Department of Education issued a circular this fall stopping all students enrolled in the state's compulsory nine years of elementary and junior high school education from picking cotton in work-study programs. The XUAR government discontinued this form of work-study because central government funding for rural compulsory education, which doubled in 2008 over the previous year, meets XUAR schools' funding needs, according to the report.

Wo Weihan, a Chinese citizen, was detained in January 2005 and sentenced on May 27, 2007, by the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court to execution on charges related to military espionage for Taiwan and endangering state security, according to press reports (see November 22 Reuters report, for example). On March 24, 2008, the Beijing High People's Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence. Under Chinese law, Mr. Wo's sentence was subject to final review by China’s Supreme People's Court. Mr.

Although the Chinese government has developed an anti-AIDS policy framework, civil society engagement remains a major challenge in the fight against the epidemic, according to an October 8 article written by the Executive Director of the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) published in the state-run China Daily. As of October 2007, an estimated 700,000 new HIV infections reportedly had occurred in China since 2006, representing an 8-percent increase, according to Chinese and UN official statistics cited in the scientific journal Nature's new study (subscription required) released on October 2, 2008. Among those newly infected, the study reported that men who have sex with men and women in general had the highest rate of growth.

Authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) released from the hospital a Uyghur woman who is six months pregnant with her third child, after cancelling plans to subject her to a forced abortion for violating the region's population planning regulations, according to reports from Radio Free Asia (RFA). Unable to pay a 45,000 yuan (US$6,591) fine for exceeding the number of births permitted under the region's population planning system, Arzigul (Arzugül) Tursun, a villager from Ghulja county, initially fled home to avoid being forced to have an abortion in place of paying the fine, RFA reported on November 13. After pressuring Arzigul Tursun's family to locate her, authorities also coerced Arzigul Tursun's husband into signing papers to approve the abortion, RFA reported.

According to a July 21 Reuters report and a July 24 Agence France-Presse (via Yahoo News) report, Beijing authorities launched an anti-pollution campaign that month to halt construction and close factories in the city, leaving migrants who had worked on Olympic projects jobless and forcing them to leave the city or find work elsewhere. A March 12 Human Rights Watch report documented severe exploitation of migrants who lack household registration and work for Olympic construction sites, including failure to provide insurance and social services, faulty or non-existent labor contracts, and unpaid wages.