China rights record deteriorating before Olympics -group

BEIJING, Jan 12 (Reuters) Human rights conditions in China deteriorated last year, dashing hopes the leadership would bring reforms and that there would be an improvement ahead of the 2008 Olympics, a watchdog group said.

Legal reforms stalled, restrictions on the press and Internet use intensified and rights activists faced harassment and unlawful detention, Human Rights Watch said in a report.

''Several high-profile, politically motivated prosecutions of lawyers and journalists in 2006 put an end to any hopes that President Hu Jintao would be a progressive reformer,'' the New York-based group said.

''Domestic observers believe that these constraints will remain in place at least through the 2008 Summer Olympics being hosted by Beijing,'' it said.

Beijing pledged during its bid that allowing it to host the Games would help advance human rights, but critics say that is not happening and Chinese activists have urged the International Olympic Committee to press China to improve its record.

China's Foreign Ministry hit out at the report, accusing the group of interfering in the country's internal affairs.

''Regretfully, in spite of their observations their eyesight has always had problems. Maybe they are wearing tinted glasses, or only squinting,'' spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news briefing.

''Their reports always have a political objective, not a goodwilled one, and their contents do not conform with reality,'' he added. ''China's human rights situation is achieving continued progress.'' Human Rights Watch said some problems had grown worse in the as Beijing cleans up the city for the Olympics and clamps down on any threats to social stability.

Forced evictions have increased as neighbourhoods are cleared to make way for Olympic sites, and schools for children of migrant workers have been shut down as the city seeks to clear migrant labourers from Beijing, the report said.

Beijing officials say they plan to improve living conditions for migrant workers this year and whether they left the city during the Games would depend on the amount of work available.

''To my knowledge there are no provisions to force migrant city workers to leave the city at Games time and I think officials have made this clear,'' Sui Zhenjiang, Director of Beijing Municipal Construction Commission, said on Wednesday.

Human Rights Watch also said China had intensified efforts to use the war on terror to tighten controls on ethnic Uighurs, a mainly Islamic group concentrated in the oil-rich northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Earlier this week, China said it had killed 18 people and arrested 17 in a raid on a training camp in Xinjiang it said was run by the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement, but the report said such arrests were not subject to due process.

'''Strike Hard' campaigns subject Uighurs who express 'separatist' tendencies to quick, secret, and summary trials, sometimes accompanied by mass sentencing rallies,'' it said.

The report cited a ''vast police and state security apparatus'' that enforces controls on protesters, critics and civil society activists and keeps tabs on the Internet and newspapers.

In the past year, China jailed New York Times researcher Zhao Yan on fraud charges, removed editors of outspoken newspapers and proposed a law that would require journalists to obtain permission before breaking sensitive news.

It also introduced rules requiring foreign media to seek the approval of the state-run Xinhua news agency to distribute news, pictures and graphics within China.

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