The report, “Justice Denied: Harassment of Sichuan earthquake survivors and activists” will be released on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake on May 12. It includes interviews with parents who lost their children to the earthquake, legal experts, and several others.
Close to 70,000 people lost their lives in the earthquake, 10,000 of whom were children. A large portion of the deaths are attributed to poorly built schools. In several cities, school buildings laid in ruins while others nearby stood nearly unscathed. A closer examination of the school rubble reveals stacked bricks with nothing holding them together, thin metal bars, and mortar that can be rubbed off with a bare hand.
Parents who demanded answers were met with arrests and harassment.
“By unlawfully locking up parents of children who died, the government is creating more misery for people who have said in some cases they lost everything in the Sichuan Earthquake,” said Roseann Rife, Amnesty International Asia-Pacific deputy program director, in a press release.
“The government of China must cease harassing earthquake survivors who are seeking answers and trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives,” Rife said.
Among the issues addressed in the report are cases where Chinese authorities prevented parents and relatives from bringing the issue of poorly built schools to higher officials. According to an Amnesty press release about the report, many of the parents and relatives “were subjected to arbitrary detention or unlawful surveillance to prevent them from pursuing legal remedies.”
When parents who lost their children to the poorly built schools tried to bring the issue to the courts, they were denied. The provincial court in Sichuan province issued a directive to all lower courts to ban the acceptance of cases “deemed sensitive,” which includes compensation for injuries, property damage, and disputes over compensation by insurance companies.
The Amnesty report includes translations of official court documents stating these directives.
Lawyers and activists who tried to help the parents were also harassed by the regime. Some of the activists also now face trial for “vaguely defined state security and public order maintenance crimes,” according to Amnesty.
“The human toll of the Sichuan earthquake was incalculable but authorities need to do everything in their power to protect the rights of the survivors and stop the unlawful detentions as well as allow lawyers and civil society to pursue their important functions of accountability,” Rife said.
