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The Global Persecution of Women
Glossary
Human Rights
Human Rights
UDHR
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. ...
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
CEDAW
Article 5
States Parties shall take all appropriate measures:
(a) To modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.Cheung v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration) (F.C.A., no. A-760-91), Heald, Mahoney, Desjardins, April 29, 1993.
The forced sterilization of women is a fundamental violation of basic human rights. It violates Articles 3 and 5 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ... The forced sterilization of a woman is a serious and totally unacceptable violation of her security of the person. Forced sterilization subjects a woman to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. ... I have no doubt, then, that the threat of forced sterilization can ground a fear of persecution within the meaning of Convention refugee under the Immigration Act.
La Forest J., dissenting, in Chan v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration) [1995] 3 S.C.R. 593.
Whatever technique is employed, it is utterly beyond dispute that forced sterilization is in essence an inhuman and degrading treatment involving bodily mutilation, and constitutes the very fundamental violation of basic human rights that is the concern of refugee law.
"Compulsory Sterilization." Wikipedia.
Compulsory sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization. In the first half of the twentieth century, many such programs were instituted in many countries around the world, usually as part of eugenics programs intended to prevent the reproduction of members of the population considered to be carriers of undesirable genetic traits. ...
Usually such programs advocated sterilization by means of vasectomy in males and salpingectomy or tubal ligation in females, as they were not operations which significantly affected sexual drive or the personality of the individuals operated upon (unlike, for example, castration). It has been argued that this increased the seemingly innocuous nature of the operations, adding a veneer of scientific objectivity and detachment. Some of these operations were carried out not only against the will of the patient, but without their knowledge, at the same time as other operations.
Today compulsory sterilization programs are usually seen as overly coercive and blunt attempts at genetic engineering which focused disproportionately on poor and disenfranchized groups. The most well-known compulsory sterilization programs were those of Nazi Germany (which sterilized over 400,000 individuals in the 1930s and 1940s), the United States (which sterilized over 64,000 individuals from 1900s through the 1970s), and many Scandinavian countries. Sweden sterlised the highest proportion of their own citizen, 62,000 individuals from the 1930s through the 1970s within the population of +6,000,000 where it was made condition for receiving welfare, release from institution or prisons or keeping custody of children.
Plans for forced sterilization for the purposes of avoiding overpopulation are sometimes, but not usually, directly related to a eugenic intent. (See population control for more information on this type of sterilization.)
China
Mark Magnier, “China’s One-Child Problem,” LA Times, 11 July 2006.
Chen [Guangchen], villagers and his lawyers say tens of thousands of women and men were subjected to forced abortions and obligatory sterilization in and around Linyi, a municipal area with about 10 million people, in order to meet stringent quotas under the one-child campaign.
Hannah Beech, “Enemies of the State,” Time, 12 Sept. 2005
The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan's due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. "At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot," says the 23-year-old. "Then, after a while, I couldn't feel her moving anymore." Ten hours later, Li delivered the girl she had intended to name Shuang (Bright). The baby was dead. To be absolutely sure, says Li, the officials--from the Linyi region, where she lives, in China's eastern Shandong province--dunked the infant's body for several minutes in a bucket of water beside the bed. All she could think about on that day last spring, recalls Li, was how she would hire a gang of thugs to take revenge on the people who killed her baby because the birth, they said, would have violated China's family-planning scheme.
Since 1980, when China began fully carrying out what is commonly known as the one-child policy, officials in the provinces have often resorted to draconian measures--forced sterilizations and late-term abortions among them--to prevent the country's population of 1.3 billion from expanding into a Malthusian nightmare. Government leaders credit China's stringent population control with helping spur economic growth by reducing the number of mouths that must be fed. But in 2002, as personal freedoms proliferated in other areas of life, parliament voted to ease the deeply unpopular policy. Instead of forbidding extra children outright, the new law, among other reforms, allowed couples to have multiple offspring if they were willing to pay big fines. The costs can be exorbitant for peasants like Li--$365 or more for the first additional child in Linyi, around four times the average annual net income in this impoverished region. But at least the Chinese now possess a modicum of choice in family matters, which they lacked a few years ago.
The Communist Party bureaucracy, however, doesn't seem to have caught up with the new law. Despite laxer regulation, the career advancement of local leaders, especially in rural areas, still often depends on keeping birthrates low. "One set of bad population figures can stop an official from getting promoted," says Tu Bisheng, a Beijing legal activist who has helped document abuses related to the one-child policy.
At a provincial meeting last year, Linyi officials were castigated for having the highest rate of extra births in all of Shandong, according to lawyers familiar with the situation. The dressing-down galvanized what appears to be one of the most brutal mass sterilization and abortion campaigns in years. Starting in March, family-planning officials in Linyi's nine counties and three districts trawled villages, looking to force women pregnant with illegal children to abort, and to sterilize those who already had the maximum allotment of children under the local family-planning policy. According to that regulation, which exists in a similar form in most rural areas, women with a son are not allowed to bear more children, whereas mothers whose first child is handicapped or a girl are allowed to have a second baby.
Many women refused to undergo the procedures. Others hid, often in family members' homes. The crackdown intensified. Relatives of women who resisted sterilization or abortion were detained and forced to pay for "study sessions" in which they had to admit their "wrong thinking," says Teng Biao, an instructor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, who visited Linyi last month to investigate the coercive campaign. In the Linyi county of Yinan alone, at least 7,000 people were forced to undergo sterilization between March and July, according to lawyers who spoke with local family-planning officials. Several villagers, the lawyers allege, were beaten to death while under detention for trying to help family members avoid sterilization.
Officials in Linyi deny that anything improper has happened. "All these things are either exaggerated, distorted or not based on facts," says an official surnamed Yao (he wouldn't give his full name) at the Linyi municipal family-planning commission. But national-level cadres concede that something has gone terribly wrong. "We have heard about the situation in Shandong, and it's totally against national law," a member of the State Family Planning Commission's secretariat in Beijing told TIME. "We are investigating the situation now." A public statement from the commission said that central and provincial authorities have cautioned Linyi officials to follow national regulations, vowing to punish lawbreakers.
The plight of Linyi's women was publicized by a most unlikely man. Chen Guangcheng was blinded at a young age in Linyi and learned massage in Beijing, one of the few subjects those without sight in China are allowed to study. But Chen was fascinated by law and while in Beijing sat in on several university law courses. Returning to Linyi, he became a legal activist, advising peasants on land and tax disputes. In March, a stream of distraught peasants complained to him of forced sterilizations and the detentions of family members. Chen, 34, had heard about the campaign; many people in his village, he told TIME, had been imprisoned at one time or another for defying the sterilization order. But he had no idea the campaign was so widespread. After discussing the issue with lawyer friends in Beijing, Chen decided to file a class action against Linyi officials for contravening national family-planning law. Chinese journalists traveled to Shandong to chronicle his mission but were not allowed to publish articles about him in the domestic press.
By mid-August, Chen was under house arrest for his activities. Seven people, he and his wife say, were stationed outside his home to watch him. But Chen felt he had to escape to Beijing to continue with the lawsuit. On the evening of Aug. 25, while police snoozed outside, he sneaked out in the dark. Hearing someone follow him, Chen threw handfuls of gravel in different directions to confuse his pursuer. "The night gives me an advantage," says Chen. "I can navigate better than people with sight can." With a relative as a guide, Chen fled into fields of tall corn and walked for miles before meeting a friend who drove him to safety. But when Chen reached Beijing, four officials who had come from Linyi hassled him at the railway station. When he met again with TIME last week in Beijing, Chen's hands were shaking. Three hours after the interview, Linyi officials hustled him into a vehicle and took off. Chen is again under house arrest in Linyi.
Whistle-blowers in China often face retribution for publicizing official malfeasance. "I know I'm at risk, but I cannot give up, because people are depending on me," said Chen shortly before he was detained. Yet even if Chen is released from house arrest and his lawsuit succeeds, it will do little to change the fate of women like Hu Bingmei. When family-planning officials came to fetch her in May for a forced sterilization, Hu escaped with her two daughters to her parents' home in another village. Several days later, seven officials showed up, she says, grabbed her younger child and shoved the girl into a car. Afraid that her daughter would be abducted, Hu jumped into the vehicle with them. The car drove to the local family-planning clinic, where, Hu says, nurses threw her onto an operating table. "Other people were fine after their operations, but it hurt me so much, I could barely stand up," says Hu, 33. Two weeks later, doctors operated again and promised things would heal better. But even today, Hu doubles over in pain after just a few steps. "They told me they were doing this for my own good," says Hu. "But they have ruined my life."
”Andrew Yah, “’Barefoot lawyer’ exposes abuses by Chinese officials,” Financial Times, 27 Sept. 2005.
For a blind man described by supporters as a “barefoot lawyer” for his work advising villagers fighting brutal population control measures in Shandong province, Chen Guangcheng has attracted the kind of official ire typically reserved for high-profile dissidents.
During a two-week detention in a village in the city of Linyi, authorities have set up roadblocks near his house and posted guards at the local railway station to prevent visitors from having any contact with Mr Chen. …
Following complaints by Mr Chen and local villagers about forced abortions and sterilisations in the area, Beijing's family planning commission last week dismissed and arrested some officials around Linyi accused of carrying out a campaign to restrict births. China's central government sets stringent family planning goals for its localities in order to keep the number of births low, but provides only vague guidelines about how policies should be administered. …
Mr Chen and supporters have conducted hunger strikes in protest, say people close to the situation. The abuses in Linyi have drawn widespread attention from foreign publications, Chinese legal experts and even the US embassy. But the event has gone mostly unreported in the domestic press.
Some researchers estimate that, in the past six months as efforts to reduce births intensified, there are likely to have been several thousand sterilisations in just one region in Linyi alone.
“It's the worst thing we have in our files,” says a foreign expert of the Linyi case. Teng Biao, a young professor in Beijing who wrote a report on abuses there, says local officials beat villagers, held families of pregnant women hostage and forced villagers to undergo “family planning learning sessions”.
In addition to local family planning officials, Mr Teng alleges a wide range of local government bodies around Linyi and hired assailants have been involved in brutal enforcement procedures.
“The most direct goal was to help villagers get legal help and make the government give them compensation,” says Mr Teng of his report. Despite the outcry and an investigation by the National Population and Family Planning Commission, questions are being raised over Beijing's commitment to eradicating abuses. A person with ties to the NPFPC says local authorities knew about the violence in Linyi before July, when speculation about abuses began trickling out via domestic activists. NPFPC officials did not respond to requests for comment. Several Shandong province and Linyi government offices including police and family planning departments either declined to comment or denied knowledge of abuses.
“It's none of your business,” said one local family planning official.
Hannah Beech, “Enemies Of the State? How local officials in China launched a brutal campaign of forced abortions and sterilizations,” Time, 12 Sept. 2005.
The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan's due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. "At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot," says the 23-year-old. "Then, after a while, I couldn't feel her moving anymore." Ten hours later, Li delivered the girl she had intended to name Shuang (Bright). The baby was dead. To be absolutely sure, says Li, the officials--from the Linyi region, where she lives, in China's eastern Shandong province--dunked the infant's body for several minutes in a bucket of water beside the bed. All she could think about on that day last spring, recalls Li, was how she would hire a gang of thugs to take revenge on the people who killed her baby because the birth, they said, would have violated China's family-planning scheme.
Since 1980, when China began fully carrying out what is commonly known as the one-child policy, officials in the provinces have often resorted to draconian measures--forced sterilizations and late-term abortions among them--to prevent the country's population of 1.3 billion from expanding into a Malthusian nightmare. Government leaders credit China's stringent population control with helping spur economic growth by reducing the number of mouths that must be fed. But in 2002, as personal freedoms proliferated in other areas of life, parliament voted to ease the deeply unpopular policy. Instead of forbidding extra children outright, the new law, among other reforms, allowed couples to have multiple offspring if they were willing to pay big fines. The costs can be exorbitant for peasants like Li--$365 or more for the first additional child in Linyi, around four times the average annual net income in this impoverished region. But at least the Chinese now possess a modicum of choice in family matters, which they lacked a few years ago.
The Communist Party bureaucracy, however, doesn't seem to have caught up with the new law. Despite laxer regulation, the career advancement of local leaders, especially in rural areas, still often depends on keeping birthrates low. "One set of bad population figures can stop an official from getting promoted," says Tu Bisheng, a Beijing legal activist who has helped document abuses related to the one-child policy.
At a provincial meeting last year, Linyi officials were castigated for having the highest rate of extra births in all of Shandong, according to lawyers familiar with the situation. The dressing-down galvanized what appears to be one of the most brutal mass sterilization and abortion campaigns in years. Starting in March, family-planning officials in Linyi's nine counties and three districts trawled villages, looking to force women pregnant with illegal children to abort, and to sterilize those who already had the maximum allotment of children under the local family-planning policy. According to that regulation, which exists in a similar form in most rural areas, women with a son are not allowed to bear more children, whereas mothers whose first child is handicapped or a girl are allowed to have a second baby.
Many women refused to undergo the procedures. Others hid, often in family members' homes. The crackdown intensified. Relatives of women who resisted sterilization or abortion were detained and forced to pay for "study sessions" in which they had to admit their "wrong thinking," says Teng Biao, an instructor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, who visited Linyi last month to investigate the coercive campaign. In the Linyi county of Yinan alone, at least 7,000 people were forced to undergo sterilization between March and July, according to lawyers who spoke with local family-planning officials. Several villagers, the lawyers allege, were beaten to death while under detention for trying to help family members avoid sterilization.
Officials in Linyi deny that anything improper has happened. "All these things are either exaggerated, distorted or not based on facts," says an official surnamed Yao (he wouldn't give his full name) at the Linyi municipal family-planning commission. But national-level cadres concede that something has gone terribly wrong. "We have heard about the situation in Shandong, and it's totally against national law," a member of the State Family Planning Commission's secretariat in Beijing told TIME. "We are investigating the situation now." A public statement from the commission said that central and provincial authorities have cautioned Linyi officials to follow national regulations, vowing to punish lawbreakers.
The plight of Linyi's women was publicized by a most unlikely man. Chen Guangcheng was blinded at a young age in Linyi and learned massage in Beijing, one of the few subjects those without sight in China are allowed to study. But Chen was fascinated by law and while in Beijing sat in on several university law courses. Returning to Linyi, he became a legal activist, advising peasants on land and tax disputes. In March, a stream of distraught peasants complained to him of forced sterilizations and the detentions of family members. Chen, 34, had heard about the campaign; many people in his village, he told TIME, had been imprisoned at one time or another for defying the sterilization order. But he had no idea the campaign was so widespread. After discussing the issue with lawyer friends in Beijing, Chen decided to file a class action against Linyi officials for contravening national family-planning law. Chinese journalists traveled to Shandong to chronicle his mission but were not allowed to publish articles about him in the domestic press.
By mid-August, Chen was under house arrest for his activities. Seven people, he and his wife say, were stationed outside his home to watch him. But Chen felt he had to escape to Beijing to continue with the lawsuit. On the evening of Aug. 25, while police snoozed outside, he sneaked out in the dark. Hearing someone follow him, Chen threw handfuls of gravel in different directions to confuse his pursuer. "The night gives me an advantage," says Chen. "I can navigate better than people with sight can." With a relative as a guide, Chen fled into fields of tall corn and walked for miles before meeting a friend who drove him to safety. But when Chen reached Beijing, four officials who had come from Linyi hassled him at the railway station. When he met again with TIME last week in Beijing, Chen's hands were shaking. Three hours after the interview, Linyi officials hustled him into a vehicle and took off. Chen is again under house arrest in Linyi.
Whistle-blowers in China often face retribution for publicizing official malfeasance. "I know I'm at risk, but I cannot give up, because people are depending on me," said Chen shortly before he was detained. Yet even if Chen is released from house arrest and his lawsuit succeeds, it will do little to change the fate of women like Hu Bingmei. When family-planning officials came to fetch her in May for a forced sterilization, Hu escaped with her two daughters to her parents' home in another village. Several days later, seven officials showed up, she says, grabbed her younger child and shoved the girl into a car. Afraid that her daughter would be abducted, Hu jumped into the vehicle with them. The car drove to the local family-planning clinic, where, Hu says, nurses threw her onto an operating table. "Other people were fine after their operations, but it hurt me so much, I could barely stand up," says Hu, 33. Two weeks later, doctors operated again and promised things would heal better. But even today, Hu doubles over in pain after just a few steps. "They told me they were doing this for my own good," says Hu. "But they have ruined my life."
Philip P. Pan, “Rural Activist Seized in Beijing,” Washington Post, 7 Sept. 2005.
Jerome Cohen, a specialist on Chinese law at New York University who is teaching in Beijing this fall, said he met with Chen on Monday night and discussed the risks of the lawsuit with him. Chen was determined to press ahead, Cohen said.
"This seems to be a case of local officials who have blatantly abused their legal powers, and have no legitimate defense against the case he brought against them, resorting to extralegal methods to cut off his ability to pursue justice," Cohen said. "It's very, very sad, and another example of how rough the legal situation is in rural areas."
Philip P. Pan, “Who Controls the Family? Blind Activist Leads Peasants in Legal Challenge To Abuses of China's Population-Growth Policy” Washington Post, 27 Aug. 2005.
LINYI, China -- A crowd of disheveled villagers was waiting when Chen Guangcheng stepped out of the car. More women than men among them, a mix of desperation and hope on their faces, they ushered him along a dirt path and into a nearby house. Then, one after another, they told him about the city's campaign against "unplanned births."
Since March, the farmers said, local authorities had been raiding the homes of families with two children and demanding at least one parent be sterilized. Women pregnant with a third child were forced to have abortions. And if people tried to hide, the officials jailed their relatives and neighbors, beating them and holding them hostage until the fugitives turned themselves in.
Chen, 34, a slender man wearing dark sunglasses, held out a digital voice recorder and listened intently. Blind since birth, he couldn't see the tears of the women forced to terminate pregnancies seven or eight months along, or the blank stares of the men who said they submitted to vasectomies to save family members from torture. But he could hear the pain and anger in their voices and said he was determined to do something about it.
For weeks, Chen has been collecting testimony about the population-control abuses in this city of 10 million, located about 400 miles southeast of Beijing, beginning in his own village in the rural suburbs, then traveling from one community to the next. Now he is preparing an unlikely challenge to the crackdown: a class-action lawsuit.
"What these officials are doing is completely illegal," Chen said. "They've committed widespread violations of citizens' basic rights, and they should be held responsible."
It might appear a quixotic crusade -- a blind peasant with limited legal training taking on the Communist Party's one-child policy, which has long been considered a pillar of the nation's economic development strategy and off-limits to public debate. But the Linyi case marks a legal milestone in challenging the coercive measures used for decades to limit population growth in China.
While there have been scattered cases of individuals suing family planning officials, legal scholars say the Linyi farmers appear to be the first to band together and challenge the state's power to compel people to undergo sterilization or abort a pregnancy since the enactment of a 2002 law guaranteeing citizens an "informed choice" in such matters.
"The population and family planning law affects everyone's individual rights, so a case like this is an important test," said Zhan Zhongle, a law professor at Beijing University who helped draft the legislation. "By suing the government, the Linyi peasants are merely asserting their legal rights. Whether the courts accept the case, and how they handle it, will be a test of China's justice system and of whether China can govern according to law."
Forced abortions and compulsory sterilization, though never openly endorsed by the government, have been an element of China's family planning practices since at least 1980, when the national population topped 1 billion and the party concluded that unchecked growth could undermine economic development and launched the one-child policy. But resistance has always been widespread, especially in the countryside, where farmers depend on children to help in the fields and support them in their old age.
As rural anger mounted and international criticism of such practices grew, the party began experimenting in the mid-1990s with less coercive methods, expanding health services for women, providing more information about contraception and implementing regulations barring involuntary sterilization and abortion. The government adopted the law granting citizens the right to make an "informed choice" in family planning, and in recent years it has moved toward a system of economic rewards for couples with only one child and fines or fees for those with more.
But many local officials continue to rely on forced abortion and sterilization, in part because the ability to limit population growth remains a top consideration in party deliberations about promotions and raises. In much of China, an official who misses a population target, even if he or she excels in other fields, is dismissed, according to researchers and family planning officials.
In Linyi, residents said local officials ordered couples to come in for sterilization even if they had been given permission to have a second child. Women with intrauterine birth-control devices were not exempt.
Du Dehong, 33, a corn farmer in Yinghu village, said seven officials showed up at her home on the night of May 9, pushed her into a small white van and took her to the county family planning station. They ordered her to fill out a form, and when she refused, one of the men grabbed her hand and forced her to leave a fingerprint.
"He said, 'Even if you stay here and resist for three days, we're going to operate on you eventually,' " Du recalled. She said she relented, and the operation took just 10 minutes.
A few days later, she and her husband sought out Chen. Over the years, their blind neighbor had earned a reputation as someone who understood the law -- and would stand up to the government.
In 1996, he had traveled to Beijing with a complaint about his family's taxes. He won a refund and admission to a university to study acupuncture and massage, the only higher education courses available to the blind in China. He took law classes on the side, and then began campaigning for the rights of the disabled and farmers.
When neighbors told him about the family planning abuses, he proposed a lawsuit. Word spread quickly, and Chen emerged as the leader of the battle against the forced abortion and sterilization campaign.
On a recent visit to Maxiagou village, in another rural part of Linyi, he interviewed Feng Zhongxia, 36. She recounted that she was seven months pregnant and on the run when she learned that local officials had detained more than a dozen of her relatives and wouldn't release them unless she returned for an abortion.
"My aunts, uncles, cousins, my pregnant younger sister, my in-laws, they were all taken to the family planning office," she said. "Many of them didn't get food or water, and all of them were severely beaten." Some of the relatives were allowed to call her, and they pleaded with her to come home.
Feng called the family planning officials. "They told me they would peel the skin off my relatives and I would only see their corpses if I didn't come back," she said. The next day, she turned herself in. A doctor examined her, then stuck a needle into her uterus. About 24 hours later, she delivered the dead fetus. "It was a small life," she said quietly.
Afterward, she said, the family planning workers insisted on sterilizing her, too. "I'm a human being. How can they treat me like that?" she asked.
Chen sat listening to and recording the peasants' stories for several hours. Some described midnight raids on their homes involving as many as 30 officials and hired thugs. Others recalled being held in rooms crowded with more than 50 other villagers, including children, adding that the officials charged them exorbitant fees for food and "study sessions" when they were released.
The last to speak was Mei Shouqin, 42, who can no longer walk up a flight of stairs because of a botched tubal ligation. When the doctor explained what had gone wrong, he didn't apologize, she recalled. He just said she needed to return in a month so he could try again.
Liu Chuanyu, a Linyi family planning official reached by phone, denied knowledge of the abuses. "All of our work is done according to national policy and the demands of upper-level officials," he said. Other local family planning officials reached by phone declined to give their names and also denied any wrongdoing.
But Yu Xuejin, a senior official with the national family planning commission in Beijing, said his office had received complaints about abuses in Linyi and asked provincial authorities to investigate. He said the practices described by the farmers, including forced sterilization and abortion, were "definitely illegal."
Yu emphasized that the central government had led the nation toward more humane family planning practices over the past decade. "If the Linyi complaints are true, or even partly true, it's because local officials do not understand the new demands of the Chinese leadership regarding family planning work," he said.
Yu also applauded the farmers for asserting their rights. If officials in Linyi violated the law, he said, "I support the ordinary people. If they need help, we'll help them find lawyers."
But back in Linyi, Chen said progress had been slow. State media have been afraid to report on the crackdown, and without the publicity, he has been unable to raise funds.
At the same time, he said, local officials have visited him three times and urged him to persuade the farmers to drop the lawsuit. He said one warned him that "offending the government isn't good," and said if any officials were fired because of his lawsuit, "they might try to take revenge."
But Chen said he wasn't backing down. "If you've violated the law, you must take responsibility," he said. "If we withdraw the lawsuit, then they'll just violate the law again next time."
Family Planning Rules and Regulations in Jiang Su Province, 23 October 2002.
Article 28. For thoise who are not allowed to give birth to children according to the rules and regulations but have got pregnant, if their pregnancies are allowed to be stopped medically, their pregnancies must be stopped [immediately]. .... Article 42. Basic programs of technical services for family planning ... include ... induced abortion operations.
”Refugee claimant rejected for forcing abortion,” The Interim, April 2005.
Li Min Lai, a Chinese “family-planning manager” who forced an abortion on a worker who was seven months’ pregnant was denied refugee status in Canada.
Federal Court Justice Sandra Simpson said that Li’s actions constituted a “crime against humanity,” even though she was not motivated by cruelty and was just doing her job enforcing China’s one-child policy.
Li, 47, was the office manager of family planning for Chinese bus company Fushun. She told the refugee board that she was “very serious” in enforcing China’s one-child policy among the company’s female employees. She described her work as successful and highlighted a 2000 case where she camped out at a pregnant woman’s home every other day. Li told the employee and her husband that they would be fined and threatened the loss of their jobs if they had the child. She also noted that the child would not be registered with the household registry and would therefore be ineligible for a state education. When these threats did not succeed, Li warned that the woman would be arrested.
Simpson found that the refugee board was correct to conclude that Li “had ‘forced’ (the woman) to have the abortion using relentless and extreme pressure.” In her ruling, Simpson said: “It is clear from her own evidence that with her relentless, and highly abusive, tactics she forced pregnant women … to have abortions.”
Judge Simpson upheld a 2004 refugee board decision that said coercive abortions violated the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which is incorporated into Canada’s Immigration Act.
Alexa Olesen, “China Explains Detention of Woman,” New York Times, 10 Jan. 2005.
BEIJING - China on Monday denied claims by U.S. officials and a human rights group that a Shanghai woman is undergoing re-education through forced labor because she campaigned to abolish the country's one-child family planning policy.
The woman, Mao Hengfeng, is in a labor camp not for her opinions about China's policy but because she disturbed the peace, the government said.
State Department officials and the New York-based Human Rights in China group have said Mao was fired from her job in the late 1980s after a second pregnancy, which violated family planning laws.
They said Mao, because of her campaign to abolish regulations that limit most urban couples to only one child, has been forcibly incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, tortured and re-educated through labor.
In a rare statement faxed to The Associated Press, the State Council, China's Cabinet, said Mao was fired in 1989 because she missed 16 days of work and not because she was pregnant with her third child at the time.
Mao's first pregnancy resulted in twin boys. In 1989, she had a daughter.
She also protested at several judicial offices in May and October 2003, which disturbed the peace, it said.
"Mao was sentenced to re-education because she disturbed the public order," according to the statement, which was unsolicited. "It had nothing to do with the family planning policy."
The statement did not address the claims of forced incarceration in psychiatric hospitals or torture.
Last week, Human Rights in China said Mao's 1 1/2-year sentence had been extended by three months.
State Department officials cited Mao's case in testimony before Congress last month, saying China's family planning policies were harshly coercive.
In the 1970s, China launched a one-child policy to slow the growth of its population, which officially hit 1.3 billion last week. Couples who have unsanctioned children have been subject to heavy fines, job losses and forced sterilization.
There have been some modifications, including allowing second children for ethnic populations and rural families whose first child is a girl.
In 2002, under strong U.S. pressure, Beijing enacted a national law aimed at standardizing birth-control policies and reducing corruption and coercion.
CHN38921.E, “China: The "out-of-plan" birth penalties meted out to residents of Guangdong province generally, or Guangzhou City in particular, arising as a result of the national census of 1-15 November 2000,” 22 April 2002. Ottawa: IRB, 2002.
Authorities were reported to have ordered that 20,000 abortions and sterilizations be performed by the end of 2001 in the Huaiji region of Guangdong (The Irish Times 5 Sept. 2001; NRO 16 Aug. 2001; The Telegraph 15 Aug. 2001). Although the one-child policy was reported to no longer be "strictly applied in many rural areas," the edict was issued "after census officials revealed that the average family in Huaiji has five or more children" (ibid.) According to a 5 August 2000 article, not only would abortions be performed on women with "unauthorised" pregnancies, but doctors had also been ordered to sterilize women immediately following officially approved pregnancies (ibid.). Ann Noonan, the policy director of the Laogai Research Foundation, a US-based non-profit organization that conducts research on human rights issues in China, stated in a 16 August 2001 article that, in order to meet the imposed quota, nearly 100 per cent of all pregnancies would need to be aborted (NRO). A 5 September 2001 article in the Irish Times stated that, as a result of this imposed quota, in recent months, women of childbearing-age in Huaiji had either been sterilized or fitted with contraceptive devices and women who had been discovered to be pregnant with a second child without permission had been required to undergo an abortion and then sterilization.
Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Perspective Series: Chinese State Birth Planning in the 1990s and Beyond. September 2001, 8.
Sterilization is unpopular, but male sterilization appears to be more unpopular with males than female sterilization is with women. Or, in this male-centered culture, the balance of decision making power favors husbands over wives, making women the major targets of sterilization operations. During the 1970s and 1980s, the program nearly always performed at least a million male sterilizations a year, but during the 1990s the number dropped sharply, reaching a low of 330,000 vasectomies in 1998. Male sterilization appears particularly unpopular in more developed provinces, with few men having vasectomies regardless of the number of children they had.
DIRB, China: One-Child Policy Update. Ottawa: Research Directorate, June 1999.
Historically and culturally, male sterilization is not popular in China. ... The Chinese believe vasectomy renders men weak.
HRIC, Report on Implementation of CEDAW in the People’s Republic of China. December 1998.
p. 81. In many places, there is a lack of proper family planning counseling and over-reliance on the use of sterilization and IUDs for contraception, which has serious effects on women's health. In addition, the [present sterilization policy] policy puts unfair burdens on women by not ensuring male participation in birth control practices.
p. 86. Although more research has reportedly been done on male sterilization, figures show that the vast majority of sterilizations are performed on women: an official report said that in 1992, 95 percent of all sterilizations were performed on women.
Peru
"Peruvian Women Bribed for Sterilization," Feminist Daily News Wire, 18 February 1998.
A month after women’s groups blew the whistle on a Peruvian government sterilization program, reports of women being forced or bribed to submit to tubal ligations continue. Government health workers reportedly offered gifts, including food and clothing, to poor women for undergoing tubal ligation.
Those who survive the surgery are sent away with gifts of clothes and food, however, fatal complications sometimes arise for women who cannot afford medical treatment. A neighbor of Magna Alva, who died ten days after the surgery, said “When you don’t have anything and they offer you clothes and food for your kids, then finally you agree to do it .... Magna told them that her husband was against the idea, but they told her, ‘Don’t worry, we can do it right now, and tonight you will be back home cooking and your husband will never realize what happened.”
The Peruvian government issued quotas for sterilizations in 1995 in an effort to curb the growing population and poverty in exchange for promotions and cash for doctors and nurses. Family planning officials in Peru, where abortion is illegal, say that abstinence, the IUD and tubal ligation are the most common forms of contraception.
A United States Congressional Subcommittee on International and Human Rights Operations has begun investigations concerning the reports of forced sterilization.
Slovakia
”Women Subjected to Forced Sterilizations in Slovakia,” Feminist Daily News Wire, 4 March 2003.
A new report reveals that Romani women in Eastern Slovakia have been subjected to undergo approximately 110 forced sterilizations in government healthcare facilities. The report was released by the Center for Reproductive Rights (formerly the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy) and the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Kosice, a Slovakian organization.
Entitled “Body and Soul: Forced Sterilization and Other Assaults on Roma Reproductive Freedom,” the report is based on 230 interviews carried out in 40 Eastern Slovakian Roma settlements, commonly known as Gypsy settlements. “Slovak health care providers throughout Eastern Slovakia are complicit in the illegal and unethical practice of sterilizing Romani women without their informed consent,” the report states. “Physical and verbal abuse driven by racial hatred taints the Slovak health care system.”
Among the poorest Gypsies in Slovakia, having as many children as possible is viewed as a woman’s duty. Women commonly have half a dozen or more children by the time they reach their late twenties, the New York Times reports. “They took me into the room, and I don’t know what they did,” Maria, a Gypsy woman, told the Times. “They told me to sign this paper. Now, what I have is not normal.” According to her lawyer, the piece of paper Maria signed was a notation that stated that the patient requested sterilization, the Times reports.
The report states that “clear and consistent” patterns have been found which show that doctors and nurses in eastern Slovakia are “complicit in the illegal and unethical practice of sterilizing Romany women without obtaining their consent.” The report’s investigators state that Gypsy women were forced to deliver by Caesarean section much more than ethnic Slovaks. They also found that Gypsy women were often given second-rate care and were put into segregated wards. Gypsy women say that since the report’s release, they have been subject to harassment by the police for speaking to news organizations. The authors of the report have had their records subpoenaed and have been interrogated and threatened with criminal charges, Women’s Enews reports.
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