Chinese President's visit to Delhi provokes Tibetan protests

New Delhi:  China's president, Hu Jintao, has arrived in Delhi for the fourth BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit. Worried about protests, the police has been detaining Tibetan activists in the capital, provoking strong criticism.

Here are five new facts on the story:
1) A man who set himself on fire in Delhi on Monday at a rally died in hospital this morning. Jamphel Yeshi was 27.
2) Around 1200 cops have been posted around the hotels where The Chinese premier and the delegation will be staying. Earlier, the protesters had attempted to storm Hotel Oberoi in Delhi where Chinese premiere Hu Jintao is staying. Police have arrested the protesters. This morning, the police detained 100 activists who were protesting against Hu's visit at the United Nations office. Over 150 Tibetans have been taken in to preventive custody during the protests today. The Tibetan Youth Congress members were submitting a memorandum to embassies of all nations participating in the BRICS summit. Protests were also held at Khan Market and Jantar Mantar. There is heavy police presence in these areas.
3) The police removed activist-poet Tenzin Tsundue from a seminar yesterday at the India habitat Centre. The police is keeping a tight vigil in areas in Delhi with high Tibetan population to ensure that young Tibetans don't come out of their homes to protest.
4) China has accused the Dalai Lama of "masterminding" self-immolation bids earlier this week. At least 29 Tibetans, many of them Buddhist monks and nuns, have set themselves on fire in Tibet demanding freedom for their homeland.
5) The Chinese President will attend the BRICS summit which looks at encouraging trade among member-nations. He will also hold bilateral talks with Prime Minister Manmohan. The Chinese president is accompanied by a high-profile delegation comprising Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, State Councillor Dai Bingguo, senior ministers and business leaders.

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Chinese firm helps Iran spy on citizens

Beijing:  A Chinese telecommunications equipment company has sold Iran's largest telecom firm a powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring landline, mobile and internet communications, interviews and contract documents show.

The system was part of a 98.6 million euro contract for networking equipment supplied by Shenzhen, China-based ZTE Corp to the Telecommunication Co. of Iran (TCI), according to the documents. Government-controlled TCI has a near monopoly on Iran's landline telephone services and much of Iran's internet traffic is required to flow through its network.

The ZTE-TCI deal, signed in December 2010, illustrates how despite tightening global sanctions, Iran still manages to obtain sophisticated technology, including systems that can be used to crackdown on dissidents.

Human rights groups say they have documented numerous cases in which the Iranian government tracked down and arrested critics by monitoring their telephone calls or internet activities. Iran this month set up a Supreme Council of Cyberspace, headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said it would protect "against internet evils," according to Iranian state television.

Mahmoud Tadjallimehr, a former telecommunications project manager in Iran who has worked for major European and Chinese equipment makers, said the ZTE system supplied to TCI was "country-wide" and was "far more capable of monitoring citizens than I have ever seen in other equipment" sold by other companies to Iran. He said its capabilities included being able "to locate users, intercept their voice, text messaging ... emails, chat conversations or web access."

The ZTE-TCI documents also disclose a backdoor way Iran apparently obtains US technology despite a longtime American ban on non-humanitarian sales to Iran - by purchasing them through a Chinese company.

ZTE's 907-page "Packing List," dated July 24, 2011, includes hardware and software products from some of America's best-known tech companies, including Microsoft Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Oracle Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, Dell Inc, Juniper Networks Inc and Symantec Corp.

ZTE has partnerships with some of the US firms. In interviews, all of the companies said they had no knowledge of the TCI deal. Several - including HP, Dell, Cisco and Juniper - said in statements they were launching internal investigations after learning about the contract from Reuters.

Li Erjian, a ZTE spokesman in China, declined to answer any questions, writing in an email, "We are not going to make any comments about Iran."

TCI officials in Tehran either didn't respond to requests for comment or could not be reached.

The United States, Europe and many Arab countries accuse Iran of attempting to develop nuclear weapons, which Iran denies. But Beijing, along with Moscow, has repeatedly vetoed attempts to strengthen sanctions against Tehran. China is Iran's largest trading partner with business between the countries surpassing $45 billion last year, up $16 billion from 2010, according to Iran's FARS news agency.

ZTE, China's second largest telecom equipment maker, is publicly traded but its largest shareholder is a Chinese state-owned enterprise. The fast-growing firm, which says it sells equipment to more than 500 carriers in more than 160 countries, reported annual revenue of $10.6 billion in 2010.

TCI is owned by the Iranian government and a private consortium with reported ties to Iran's elite special-forces unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

In a recent interview Mahmoud Khosravi, managing director of Iran's government-controlled Telecommunications Infrastructure Co., boasted that sanctions have had no effect on Iran's telecom industry. "We have the latest technology in our networks," he said.

Rivals pull out
Sanctions on Iran have focused on banking, terrorism, Iran's oil industry, and individuals and companies that Western capitals believe are involved in the country's nuclear development program, which Iran maintains is peaceful. Although sanctions have not specifically targeted Iran's telecommunications industry, its future growth is expected to suffer from "severe fluctuations in the currency, the rial, as international sanctions begin to impact the economy," according to a report this month by Pyramid Research in Cambridge, Mass.

Last month, European Union diplomats said the bloc's 27 governments had reached an agreement in principle to target telecommunications equipment that can be used by Iranian authorities for monitoring anti-government dissent. But no final decision has been made and there is no target date for implementing such a ban.

Like most countries, including the United States, Iran requires telephone operators to provide law enforcement authorities with access to communications. Some telecoms equipment makers that previously provided Iran with gear capable of intercepting communications have cut back sales.

After Iran's controversial election in June 2009 sparked the country's biggest demonstrations in decades, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens, said they would reduce their business there. NSN had provided TCI with a monitoring center capable of intercepting and recording voice calls on its landline and mobile network. Ericsson had sold equipment to Iranian telecoms that included built-in interception capabilities.

Even the giant Chinese telecommunications equipment firm Huawei Technologies said it has curtailed new business in Iran. In August 2009, Huawei and British company Creativity Software beat out ZTE to win a contract to supply Iran's second largest mobile phone carrier, MTN Irancell, with a "location-based services" system, according to a press release from Creativity.

Such systems can be used to track phone users' whereabouts. Last December Huawei said that "due to the increasingly complex situation in Iran, Huawei will voluntarily restrict its business development there by no longer seeking new customers and limiting its business activities with existing customers."

"Interception solution"
ZTE's pursuit of the surveillance market is no secret. Its subsidiary, ZTE Special Equipment Co., or ZTEsec, specializes in security and surveillance systems and often co-sponsors an international trade show called ISS World where companies peddle their wares to governments and law-enforcement agencies. According to the trade show's website, a ZTEsec official gave a training seminar in Brazil last July on "ZTEsec Deep Insight Solution - Comprehensive and Intelligent Interception Solution."

The packing list for ZTE's TCI contract refers to "Equipment Model: ZXMT," a system the Chinese firm's marketing documents refer to as an "integrated monitoring system" and a "turnkey solution for lawful interception" that simultaneously monitors telephone networks and the internet.

Reuters asked project manager Tadjallimehr and a former ZTE network engineer who helped to install the ZXMT system in another country to review the ZTE packing list. Both men said that among the items were parts for a surveillance system that can monitor voice, text messaging and internet communications. The former ZTE employee said the system does not use any US-made parts or software.

Both men said the ZXMT system utilizes "deep packet inspection," a powerful and potentially intrusive technology that can read and analyze "packets" of data that travel across the internet. The technology can be used to track internet users, search for and reconstruct email messages that have been broken up into data packets, block certain types of traffic and even deliver altered web pages to users.

Andrew Lewman, executive director of The Tor Project, which distributes software so that dissidents in places like Iran and China can surf the internet undetected, says the group has collected evidence showing that Iran has been using deep packet inspection since 2010 to monitor and block internet traffic.

"They seem to be rolling it out countrywide and they seem to be willing to experiment with blocking more and more traffic," said Lewman, the project's executive director.

Tor, which has nearly 50,000 daily users in Iran, repeatedly has had to tweak its circumvention technology to outfox Iranian censors. Lewman said after using deep packet inspection to isolate and block specific traffic like Google's Gmail, the Iranian government can then record every online request for the service and trace individual users. "They can figure out the households," he said.

ZTE markets its monitoring system as low-cost and user-friendly. In May 2008, the firm made a presentation to the government-controlled Iran Telecommunication Research Center about its latest networking products, including the "ZTE Lawful Intercept Solution," according to Privacy International, a London-based non-profit that advocates the right to privacy and obtained a copy of the presentation.

In a 91-page document called "Talking to the future," ZTE noted that its ZXMT system was applicable to military and national security agencies. Citing "10 Reasons to Select ZXMT," it said the system offered "High security and good secrecy" and was "Invisible to the targets."

"A very serious matter"
The ZTE parts list includes items apparently not connected with its surveillance system. Among them are the US products, including HP computer parts and printers, Microsoft Windows software, Cisco switches, Dell flat-screen monitors, Oracle database products and Symantec anti-virus software.

According to a spokesman for the US Treasury Dept., a US company would violate sanctions "if it exports products requiring a license to a third party with the knowledge that its products will end up in Iran."

In the case of the US products on the ZTE packing list, many - and possibly all - do not require an export license and the companies say they did not know they were being shipped to Iran. Several said their agreements with foreign companies like ZTE stipulate that their products cannot be distributed to embargoed countries.

For example, an HP spokesperson said, "HP's distribution contract terms prohibit the sale of HP products into Iran ... As a matter of company policy, HP investigates any credible allegations of breaches of these contractual obligations by our partners or resellers and we are actively examining this situation."

Cisco said, "Products such as these, which are not subject to individual export licenses, can be purchased from distributors and resold without Cisco's knowledge or control. We continue to investigate this matter, as any violation of US export controls is a very serious matter."

ZTE'S contract with TCI is also signed by ZTE's Iranian subsidiary, ZTE Parsian, and another Chinese company - Beijing 8-Star International Co., which the documents state is responsible for providing certain "relevant third-party equipments." Reuters did not have access to an annex to the contract that identified the third-party products to be supplied by Beijing 8-Star.

A Reuters reporter recently visited the company's office in eastern Beijing. Two male workers there described Beijing 8-Star as a trading company with business all over the world. The otherwise sparse office contained several crates of French wine marked Bordeaux, which the workers said had been imported from France.

A man who answered the phone at Beijing 8-Star declined to answer any questions about the Iranian contract or confirm his identity. "This part of my company's business is a commercial secret," he said, adding, "I think on this matter, you'd better not ask me. Because it's my commercial secret, I don't wish to tell you."

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Chinese police may have power to disappear people

Beijing:  China is preparing to overhaul a key criminal law amid public confusion - and some dread - over whether the government is about to give police the legal authority to disappear people.

At issue is an amendment to the criminal procedure law that would allow police to secretly detain suspects for months without informing their families. The effect would be to legalize the secret detentions police have increasingly been using against political critics, activist lawyers and other dissidents. Activist Hu Jia, himself living under a form of house arrest, has dubbed it the "KGB clause."

The proposed powers, when first mooted in a draft released last summer, caused uproar among legal scholars, who called them dangerous, and ordinary Chinese, who posted comments online to the government's draft by the tens of thousands.

Now, as the national legislature prepares to pass the revised law during its annual session which starts Monday, it isn't clear whether the proposed changes are still in the bill. New drafts have not been released, as is typical in China. One well-connected scholar claims the clause has been excised out, but others say it's uncertain or won't say.

Chi Shusheng, a lawmaker and lawyer from Heilongjiang province with a reputation for defending human rights, said she last saw the revised law in January.

"I think there's been some progress," Chi said. She wouldn't elaborate.

Members of the National People's Congress legal committee, who advise the drafting of the law, declined to talk.

"Wait until the final version comes out," said Zhou Guangquan, a legal scholar and committee member. "It's not convenient for me to discuss it now."
Chinese laws are generally crafted by the central government behind closed doors with little public consultation, though there have been experiments with increased transparency in recent years. The precise reasons for the secrecy aren't entirely clear, but seem borne out of habit and expediency.

Behind the uncertainty is a tug of war between people who think China needs greater legal protections to keep advancing, and the security establishment and politicians who see a strong Communist Party as the best guarantee of the country's continuing success.

Chinese society, poor and egalitarian 30 years ago, has been stratified as decades of economic reforms create droves of millionaires and push up a new middle class while leaving behind others. People increasingly turn to the law to protect their rights and to protest when other methods don't work.

More open Chinese media and the Internet have raised awareness about miscarriages of justice, such as wrongful convictions, and the need for legal safeguards.

"People are increasingly realizing that procedural justice matters," said Joshua Rosenzweig, a human rights researcher based in Hong Kong. "There is also a general sense too that public power, the power of the state, needs to be checked."

The proposed revisions to the criminal procedure law, last amended 15 years ago, attempt to address the changing demands of this remade society. It includes rules on the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence and enshrines the privilege against self-incrimination, both measures meant to better protect detainees, said Flora Sapio, a visiting scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an expert on Chinese law.

For the most part, though, the overhaul consolidates existing rules and regulations without significantly breaking new ground, Sapio said.

The controversial exception is the expansion of police powers in Article 73 on "residential surveillance," a kind of house arrest without charge. The August draft said police could hold suspects under residential surveillance - at a fixed location outside their home - for up to six months without notifying families in cases involving state security or terrorism or if notification would impede the investigation.

In practice, police have disappeared regime critics, from Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and his wife to prominent avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei, who disappeared into police custody for nearly three months last year.

Ai's wife Lu Qing, who was distraught over the official silence during her husband's disappearance, has written an open letter to the government saying that codifying the more muscular powers for police would mark a "legal setback for China and deterioration of human rights."

The outcry may have had some effect. One prominent Beijing legal scholar, Chen Guangzhong, said this week that Article 73 has been changed from its August version and now requires that families be notified within 24 hours if a relative is put under residential surveillance in all cases except when the family cannot be reached.

Chen said he has not seen the latest version himself but was informed of the change by a colleague who he declined to identify. Chen was among the more vocal critics of the August draft when it came out.

"Personally speaking, I am relatively satisfied," said the 82-year-old tenured professor at the Chinese University of Political Science and Law in Beijing.

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View the original article here

Chinese police may have power to disappear people

Beijing:  China is preparing to overhaul a key criminal law amid public confusion - and some dread - over whether the government is about to give police the legal authority to disappear people.

At issue is an amendment to the criminal procedure law that would allow police to secretly detain suspects for months without informing their families. The effect would be to legalize the secret detentions police have increasingly been using against political critics, activist lawyers and other dissidents. Activist Hu Jia, himself living under a form of house arrest, has dubbed it the "KGB clause."

The proposed powers, when first mooted in a draft released last summer, caused uproar among legal scholars, who called them dangerous, and ordinary Chinese, who posted comments online to the government's draft by the tens of thousands.

Now, as the national legislature prepares to pass the revised law during its annual session which starts Monday, it isn't clear whether the proposed changes are still in the bill. New drafts have not been released, as is typical in China. One well-connected scholar claims the clause has been excised out, but others say it's uncertain or won't say.

Chi Shusheng, a lawmaker and lawyer from Heilongjiang province with a reputation for defending human rights, said she last saw the revised law in January.

"I think there's been some progress," Chi said. She wouldn't elaborate.

Members of the National People's Congress legal committee, who advise the drafting of the law, declined to talk.

"Wait until the final version comes out," said Zhou Guangquan, a legal scholar and committee member. "It's not convenient for me to discuss it now."
Chinese laws are generally crafted by the central government behind closed doors with little public consultation, though there have been experiments with increased transparency in recent years. The precise reasons for the secrecy aren't entirely clear, but seem borne out of habit and expediency.

Behind the uncertainty is a tug of war between people who think China needs greater legal protections to keep advancing, and the security establishment and politicians who see a strong Communist Party as the best guarantee of the country's continuing success.

Chinese society, poor and egalitarian 30 years ago, has been stratified as decades of economic reforms create droves of millionaires and push up a new middle class while leaving behind others. People increasingly turn to the law to protect their rights and to protest when other methods don't work.

More open Chinese media and the Internet have raised awareness about miscarriages of justice, such as wrongful convictions, and the need for legal safeguards.

"People are increasingly realizing that procedural justice matters," said Joshua Rosenzweig, a human rights researcher based in Hong Kong. "There is also a general sense too that public power, the power of the state, needs to be checked."

The proposed revisions to the criminal procedure law, last amended 15 years ago, attempt to address the changing demands of this remade society. It includes rules on the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence and enshrines the privilege against self-incrimination, both measures meant to better protect detainees, said Flora Sapio, a visiting scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an expert on Chinese law.

For the most part, though, the overhaul consolidates existing rules and regulations without significantly breaking new ground, Sapio said.

The controversial exception is the expansion of police powers in Article 73 on "residential surveillance," a kind of house arrest without charge. The August draft said police could hold suspects under residential surveillance - at a fixed location outside their home - for up to six months without notifying families in cases involving state security or terrorism or if notification would impede the investigation.

In practice, police have disappeared regime critics, from Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and his wife to prominent avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei, who disappeared into police custody for nearly three months last year.

Ai's wife Lu Qing, who was distraught over the official silence during her husband's disappearance, has written an open letter to the government saying that codifying the more muscular powers for police would mark a "legal setback for China and deterioration of human rights."

The outcry may have had some effect. One prominent Beijing legal scholar, Chen Guangzhong, said this week that Article 73 has been changed from its August version and now requires that families be notified within 24 hours if a relative is put under residential surveillance in all cases except when the family cannot be reached.

Chen said he has not seen the latest version himself but was informed of the change by a colleague who he declined to identify. Chen was among the more vocal critics of the August draft when it came out.

"Personally speaking, I am relatively satisfied," said the 82-year-old tenured professor at the Chinese University of Political Science and Law in Beijing.

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View the original article here