This week, members of the House of Representatives will vote on H.Con.Res. 294, a resolution condemning the People's Republic of China for its forced labor prison camp system, the "laogai". Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) and other members of Congress introduced the resolution. Representative Wolf, who chairs the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, is co-sponsoring the resolution, along with co-chairman Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA). A total of 41 co-sponsors have signed on to support the resolution, which was ordered to be reported by the House Committee on International Relations on November 16.

The Laogai is the vast labor reform system in the People's Republic of China. Created by the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong, it still serves the one-party dictatorship as the primary instrument for detaining political dissidents and penal criminals. The two major aims of the Laogai are to use all prisoners as a source of cheap labor for the communist regime and to "reform criminals" through hard labor and compulsory political indoctrination.

As the resolution states, the Laogai system is made up of more than 1,000 prisons where prisoners are forced to work in deplorable conditions for up to 16 hours a day. Prisoners are given no legal rights, are often tortured to induce confession, and are forced to relinquish their religious faith. There are more than a thousand documented cases per year of organ harvesting after execution. In addition, the goods produced through forced prison labor are exported to the United States and around the globe.

There are many treaties that China has signed, which, when broken through the perpetuation of human rights abuses in the Laogai, constitute violations of international law. Such documents include the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention against Torture and other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. As a member state of the International Labor Organization, China is also party to many agreements regarding labor conditions and the rights of workers. All such principles are broken every time Laogai prisoners are tortured, detained without trial, imprisoned for political or religious reasons, or required to work in inhuman conditions.

Exposing the laogai to the world is still a very important way of promoting human rights and freedom in China, just as it was imperative to expose the atrocities of the Holocaust and the Soviet gulag to the world. Much remains to be done to make the public aware of the laogai and its atrocities. While we cannot be certain about the exact number of laogai camps in existence, we know that countless numbers of people have suffered and continue to suffer inside the walls of the laogai, and they will not be set free until we expose the laogai to the light of the world.

Source : LRF