In a report published on Tuesday, Amnesty International claims
that China has so far detained or imprisoned at least 33 people for
offences related to their use of the internet. According to the
human rights group, these individuals range form political
activists to writers and members of unofficial organisations.
Amnesty also said that two of those detained for
internet-related offences have died in custody. Both were members
of the Falun Gong spiritual movement which was banned as a
"heretical organisation" in 1999.
Amnesty International also claims that the Chinese government
has created a special internet police and has introduced a
filtering system for search engines to block "prohibited"
words.
In August 2002, China blocked access to the Google internet
search engine for a brief period, diverting users to local Chinese
search engines instead. In recent weeks, some of the previously
blocked web sites have been opened up, but it is impossible for
users to open documents on sites relating to China.
In June 2002, China had 46 million internet users and it is
expected to become the world's largest internet market in four
years' time.
The Amnesty International report is available from:
www.web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/recent/asa170072002
