SITTING down may not sound like torture, but for prisoners strapped in metal “tiger chairs” for days, it is sheer agony.
“I sat until my buttocks bled,” said one inmate who was restrained in the iron contraption, one of China’s many horrifying instruments of punishment.
Other detainees reported being beaten while suspended in the air by their handcuffs or made to squat for hours. These are among the disturbing revelations published in a Human Rights Watch report into police torture and ill-treatment of suspects.
While China has brought in laws in the past few years aimed at curbing violence towards detainees, researchers found that many officers are easily circumventing the rules by moving inmates out of jails or abusing them in ways that do not leave marks.
The report, Tiger chairs and cell bosses: Police Torture of Criminal Suspects in China, shows that efforts to prevent torture and forced confessions and improve legal access for suspects have not gone far enough.
“[They] handcuffed both my hands and beat me, hitting and kicking was the least of it all,” said Gu Daoying, who runs a gambling parlour in Zhejiang province. “[One police officer] used an electric baton to hit me for six to seven hours, more than a hundred times. I fainted many times, and lost control over urination. Later he put his police baton on the floor and forced me to kneel on it for three hours.”
Dehydration, starvation, blinding with light, solitary confinement and exposure to extreme cold are among the other hard-to-spot techniques used on prisoners accused of crimes as minor as petty theft. The most likely to face torture, however, are suspects in murder, corruption and triad cases, the crimes most abhorred by the public.
Once the death sentence is handed down, inmates are usually kept in painful restraints for the remainder of their jail time. One convict appealing his death sentence was handcuffed and shackled in leg irons for eight years. “What he wanted the most was to ‘be able to put on clothes and eat on his own’,” said a family member. “But he can’t. He is less than an animal, which is extremely cruel. In the detention centre, he is so tightly fastened, when it is winter and so cold, he can only wrap clothes around himself. It is also difficult for him to use the toilet. He cannot straighten his body, the chains [in between handcuffs and leg irons] are very short.”
Police keep instruments for torture in their offices, a former guard told HRW — electric batons, hammers, iron bars and chilli oil to pour into the nose. But these days, they often use towels and padding to hide marks.
“They wrapped a cloth around my wrists then they handcuffed me,” said one ex-prisoner. “They tied a rope to the chain between the handcuffs and hung me on the pulley on the ceiling, my toes barely touching the ground. They shocked my hands with an electric baton, and they even stuck the baton into my right-hand pocket to hit my genitals. … I could not take it after about seven or eight minutes so I begged them to let me down so I could think things through.”
Lawyer Luo Chenghu described a young prisoner being padded with a thick stack of documents so the blows would leave no lasting marks. Shanghai lawyer Song Sanzuo added that officers were increasingly likely to try to exhaust suspects, put mental pressure on them or threaten to arrest their families — all of which are illegal.
Bad behaviour often provoked the worst punishments. Former detainee Li Fang, now in her 50s, recalled: “There was one woman who was quite deaf, and she couldn’t hear the guard, who said we were not allowed to talk. She moved and she was handcuffed to an iron bar with her hands twisted behind her, and they left her there for two to three days, even during meal times or sleep. I felt sorry for her so I held a bucket for her for when she needed to urinate or defecate.”
Another ex-prisoner, Stuart Foster, told Human Rights Watch: “In the eight months, there were four occasions [on which restraints were used], that was generally because detainees were not working and were causing disruptions like arguments and fights … Two different inmates were chained to the floor for two weeks, which meant they were unable to go to the toilet, another inmate would bring them a bucket. When you were chained to the floor they’d cut your ration, I remember one boy that … in the two weeks he was chained to the floor by the end he looked like he was dying of starvation.”
It was not always police who carried out the torture, however. The report examines the issue of “cell bosses”, inmates who manage others, in exchange for favourable treatment.
In 2014, China’s Ministry of Public Security said the problem of cell bosses had been “effectively curbed”, but former detainees and defence lawyers told HRW that they continue to act as the guard’s intermediaries and are often violent.
While this varies from prison to prison, inmates recalled beatings, whippings, removal of rations and threats that they would be “tortured to death slowly.”
Zuo Yi, who was imprisoned at the Fujian province detention centre, said: “He [the cell boss] used a clothes hanger, [he] put [my] hands on the bed and hit them with the hanger until the fingers were broken … it continued for a long time.”
Cell bosses are now banned and interrogations are supposed to take place on videotape, but the rules are often bent. And while China’s new “exclusionary rule” prohibits the use of evidence obtained through torture to convict someone, this is often ignored.
In 2014, of 432 court verdicts in which suspects alleged torture, only 23 resulted in evidence being thrown out by the court and none led to acquittal of the defendant.
Some abuse has resulted in death or permanent physical or mental disabilities, but it remains extremely difficult for prisoners to access legal assistance. The abuse is far from over.
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