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BEIJING - China is classifying more and more activities as state secrets to allow police to charge dissidents and activists with stealing or leaking state secrets, Human Rights in China said yesterday.
The expansion of secrecy laws threatens freedom of expression in China. "The complex and opaque state secrets system perpetuates a culture of secrecy that is ... deadly to Chinese society," says the report.
It details laws, regulations and official documents and regulations to show how many charges now qualify under China's state secrets system. Under a 1998 law, state secrets are defined by a catch-all phrase: "all other matters classified as state secrets by the national State Secrets Bureau". Environment issues, natural disasters, population statistics, health hazards can be retrospectively classified as state secrets.
The report gives a number of case studies of people who have been jailed under the pretext of stealing state secrets, including Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher who was arrested in 2004 over an article which predicted the resignation of former President Jiang Zemin as head of the military. He was detained for over 19 months and then formally charged with leaking secrets. Last year, Zhao was cleared but jailed for three years on a charge of fraud.
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