I. Summary

Since 2003, large numbers of Chinese citizens have been held incommunicado for days or months in secret, unlawful detention facilities. These facilities, known informally as "black jails" (黑监狱) or "black houses" (黑房屋),[1] are created and used primarily by local and provincial officials to detain petitioners who come to Beijing and provincial capitals seeking redress for complaints that are not resolved at lower levels of government. Public security officials in Beijing and other cities have not intervened to close the jails and, in at least some instances, have directly assisted black jail operators. This report, drawing on dozens of face-to-face interviews with former detainees in Beijing and other cities, details what happens to individuals once inside. Detainees are often physically and psychologically abused. Many are deprived of food, sleep, and medical care, and they are subject to theft and extortion by their guards. They have no access to family members or to legal counsel or to courts. The makeshift jails are found in state-owned hostels, hotels, nursing homes, and mental hospitals, among other locations. Some Chinese researchers and civil society activists suggest that the number of individuals detained in black jails each year reaches into the thousands.

The Chinese government denies the existence of black jails. In the "Outcome Report" issued by the UN Human Rights Council at the conclusion of its "Universal Period Review" of China's human rights record in June 2009, the Chinese government asserted: "There are no black jails in the country." China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs likewise denied the existence of black jails in response to a question from an Al Jazeera correspondent at an April 27, 2009, ministry press briefing in Beijing.

These denials persist despite reports by Chinese and foreign journalists who have visited black jails and despite academic research into the subject by well-regarded Chinese scholars. Some foreign journalists and at least one Chinese legal scholar who have investigated black jails have themselves been physically abused and/or temporarily detained by guards at such facilities.

The existence of the black jails directly contradicts Chinese government rhetoric about its commitment to rule of law and its respect for the rights and freedoms of its people. In 2004, the Chinese government amended the constitution to read that, "The state respects and preserves human rights." On December 12, 2008, Chinese President Hu Jintao marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by affirming a "people first" policy in promoting the development of human rights. Most recently, on April 13, 2009, the Chinese government issued its first ever National Human Rights Action Plan (2009-2010), which states that, "The Chinese government unswervingly pushes forward the cause of human rights in China."

The majority of black jail detainees are petitioners-citizens from rural areas who come to Beijing and provincial capitals seeking redress for abuses ranging from illegal land grabs and corruption to police torture. Petitioners, as citizens who have done nothing wrong-in fact, who are exercising their legal right to complain of being wronged themselves-are often persecuted by government officials, who employ security forces and plainclothes thugs known as retrievers or jiefang renyuan, to abduct them, often violently, and then detain them in black jails. Plainclothes thugs often actively assist black jail operators and numerous analysts believe that they do so at the behest of, or at least with the blessing of, municipal police.

Human rights abuses related to China's black jails bear a striking similarity to those of the official compulsory custody-and-repatriation, or shourong qiansong, system, which the government abruptly abolished in June 2003. Shourong, a vagrancy detention system, legally allowed police to detain "undesirables"-mostly petitioners, but also including beggars and any individuals who lacked official identification papers-and to transfer them to official "relief and repatriation" centers where they were held for a short period of time before being returned to their home districts. Researchers reported that extralegal black jails began operating within months of the abolition of the vagrancy detention system.

Black jails symbolize the failure of China's petitioning, or letters-and-visits system, a lawful practice dating back to the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) in which citizens bring their appeals for justice to the attention of the central government in Beijing. The petitioning system remains enshrined in Chinese law, with new regulations on "protecting the lawful rights and interests" of petitioners issued as recently as January 2005. However, the petitioning system is at odds with an official civil service evaluation system in which government officials at county, municipal, and provincial levels are subject to financial and career advancement penalties if large numbers of citizens from their areas are discovered in Beijing seeking legal redress through petitioning.

Faced with financial incentives to keep petitioners out of sight in Beijing, but no longer armed with a legal means for doing so, provincial and municipal-level officials have developed an extrajudicial system to intercept, abduct, and detain petitioners in black jails. Such officials make daily cash payments to the institutions which host the black jails of 150 yuan (US$22) to300 yuan (US$44) per person.

Inside China's black jails, detainees are denied access to legal counsel and in most cases contact with family and friends. Detainees are kept under constant surveillance, and subject to often arbitrary physical and psychological abuse including beatings, sexual violence, threats, and intimidation. In some black jail facilities, guards deprive detainees of food and sleep as mechanisms to punish, control, or elicit information from detainees. Black jail conditions are uniformly harsh. Detainees endure crowded sleeping quarters, unsanitary conditions, poor quality food in insufficient quantities, and violent reprisals for complaints about such conditions.

The guards at black jails routinely deny detainees access to needed medical care, even in cases of injuries from beatings. One former black jail detainee resorted to a three-day hunger strike to compel her captors to allow her access to a doctor. Former black jail detainees report that guards often steal detainees' personal belongings, including petitioning documents, demand payment for food or lodging at the black jail facilities, and demand large lump sum payments as high as 15,000 yuan (US$2,205) as a condition of release.

Minors under the age of 18 have been detained at black jails, a blatant violation of China's commitments to the rights and welfare of children. One former detainee we interviewed was a 15-year-old girl, abducted from the streets of Beijing while petitioning on behalf of her disabled father. She said she had been locked up in a nursing home in Gansu province for more than two months and subjected to severe beatings.

Key Recommendations

The Chinese government should:

• Admit the existence of black jails; close them and set detainees at liberty; and punish any person who abducts and detains another unlawfully or who operates or facilitates the operation of a black jail.
• Initiate a mass public education campaign about the legal rights of petitioners, the criminality of efforts to abduct, detain, and abuse them in black jails, and the due process rights of all criminal suspects under Chinese law and international instruments.

• Establish an independent commission to investigate and publicly report on the existence of black jails and government efforts to eradicate them.

Governments and international bodies funding Chinese legal reform or concern with human rights in China, including the United States, the European Union, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank should take an active interest in China's ongoing legal reform progress, and to that end should:

• Express strong concern to Chinese officials about the existence of black jails and violations of the rights of detainees, emphasizing that the jails violate both Chinese and international law.
• Demand that such abuses stop, that perpetrators be punished, and that victims be provided with reasonable compensation.

A more comprehensive set of recommendations is set forth at the end of this report.