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Beijing (AFP) April 26, 2010 Human rights activists in China faced an increase in government pressure last year, one rights group said in its annual report released Monday. The Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a loose-knit group organised through the Internet, said more rights campaigners were detained or questioned in China in 2009 than in recent years. "2009 stands out as a particularly repressive year in terms of the Chinese government's aggressive tactics against human rights activists," Renee Xia, the group's international director, said in a statement. "One only needs to look at the long list of imprisoned human rights defenders... who paid heavy tolls for their fight against injustice in the past year." The group cited the December 2009 jailing of veteran dissident and writer Liu Xiaobo, 54, for 11 years for his role in co-authoring a bold manifesto calling for political reform in China. The jailing of leading activists Tan Zuoren and Huang Qi after they conducted independent investigations into school collapses in the massive 2008 Sichuan earthquake also revealed a government eager to crackdown on dissent, it said. Besides jailing dissidents, the Chinese government last year also clamped down on non-governmental organisations, human rights lawyers, online citizen journalists and petitioners, the report said. "Chinese civil society is facing a serious attack.... More human rights defenders were detained, summoned by police for questioning, or subjected to 'soft detention' in 2009 than in recent years," the group said. "Citizens are becoming disillusioned with China's legal and petitioning systems, leading to an increase in 'mass incidents', protests, online activism, and other unofficial means of expressing their grievances." The group urged the government to end harassment and persecution of individuals promoting human rights and release those imprisoned or detained for seeking to defend their rights in a legal way. It also called on the government to shut down "re-education through labour" camps and "black jails" where rights defenders and petitioners have been jailed or placed in detention without the benefit of a public trial.
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