Ailing Dissident’s Case Fits a Pattern in Chinese Prisons, Critics Say<br />Accusations that Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate who has late-stage liver cancer, has not received proper treatment have brought new<br />scrutiny to what human rights advocates say is a pattern in Chinese prisons: the denial of health care to dissidents to intimidate and punish them.<br />A 2015 report by Human Rights Watch, citing interviews with former detainees, found<br />that medical care provided by detention centers was "rudimentary at best." The report said that officials barred seriously ill inmates from seeking care outside detention centers, contrary to international standards.<br />In 2014, Cao Shunli, an activist who was detained in Beijing after leading a human rights campaign, died after the<br />authorities denied her requests for medical parole to treat tuberculosis, liver disease and other ailments.<br />Frances Eve said that There is a real fear amongst prisoners of conscience and their families<br />that authorities aren’t afraid to let them die from lack of adequate medical care,<br />Mr. Liu, 61, who is serving an 11-year sentence for "inciting subversion of state power," is being treated for advanced<br />liver cancer at a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang, the authorities announced last month.<br />Tang Jingling, a human rights lawyer in southern China who was sentenced last year to five years in prison for<br />subversion of state power, fell ill last month with stabbing pains in his heart, according to his relatives.<br />This kind of an environment causes serious harm to people’s physical<br />and mental health." In China, law enforcement officers, not doctors, usually make decisions about medical parole; as a result, many requests for parole are denied, advocates say.
