Following recent revelations of China's detention of a third academic, Human Rights Watch called on the Chinese government to release the academics immediately. Xu Zerong, an Oxford PhD who was based in Hong Kong but taught at universities in southern China, was apparently detained last autumn and is still being held incommunicado.
The Human Rights Watch Academic Freedom Committee today sent a letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin to protest the detentions. Human Rights Watch was joined by other major scientific organizations in its statement, including the American Sociological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences Committee for the Human Rights of Scientists. The groups asked the Chinese government to clarify the reasons for its detention of these academics and to follow internationally recognized standards of due process.
"These detentions threaten all academics who do research in or about China," said Saman Zia-Zarifi, director of the HRW Academic Freedom program. "China needs academic cooperation with foreign universities and academics, and academic cooperation requires a reasonable level of security for scholars."
The Human Rights Watch Academic Freedom Committee is a group of prominent academic leaders and scholars, including Yuri Orlov, senior scientist at Cornell University and founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, and Jonathan F. Fanton, former president of the New School for Social Research in New York. The committee membership includes the current and past presidents of Harvard University, Columbia University and over a dozen other universities in the United States, as well as internationally prominent academics such as Lord Ralf Dahrendorf of St. Antony's College at Oxford, Krzysztof Michalski of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Ariel Dorfman of Duke University, John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard University, and Fang Lizhi of the University of Arizona.
