Results tagged “humanrightswatch”

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It's good news for those of you who stand accused of one of the nearly 70 offenses that are punishable by death in China. Under legislation enacted on Tuesday, as of January 1, all death sentences handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by China's Supreme People's Court. This reverses a 1983 law which gave such powers to the provincial courts in an effort to crack down on rising crime and corruption that occurred early under the reforms implemented under Deng Xiaoping. However, such liberal use of the death penalty in the world's most populous country and in a poor legal environment led predictably to large numbers of death sentences, many of them carried out on innocent people. Last year, a woman in Hunan reappeared 16 years after her accused killer had been executed for her murder.

Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, has taken a lot of heat lately for its complicity in suppressing free speech in China. What ever happened to "make money without doing evil"? But “things aren’t always as they appear”, as the saying goes. The smart folks at Internet Censorship Explorer have found a backdoor in Google.cn that allows users to get around the Great Firewall. Is it a feature or an oversight? We’ll let the conspiracy theorist in you sort that issue out.