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Report Faults China On Rights Failures
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Kumar added: "If we don't make any structural improvements before the Olympics, it could be worse afterwards. No one is going to pay attention once the glamour and attention and the Olympics are gone."
Chinese authorities have been using the Olympics to round up those they consider potential troublemakers, including human rights defenders, housing activists, lawyers and people attempting to report on human rights violations, the Amnesty report said.
Referring to the warnings of public security officials that they might force drug users into year-long rehabilitation programs, the Amnesty report said, "Fears remain that these abusive systems are being used to detain petty criminals, vagrants, drug addicts and others in order to 'clean-up' Beijing ahead of the Olympics."
The report welcomed one official reform -- the restoration of Supreme Court review of death penalty cases. But Amnesty said it worried that a "limited paper review" would not expose human rights violations such as police use of torture to obtain confessions.
Amnesty also took the International Olympic Committee to task for not living up to its stated commitment to act if it did not see progress on security, logistics or human rights.
Hein Verbruggen, chief of the IOC's coordination commission for the Beijing Games, sidestepped questions last week about calls for a boycott of the Olympics. "We are not in a position that we can give instructions to governments as to how they ought to behave," he said at a news conference on Wednesday.
While the IOC said it wanted to avoid political issues, China's announcement that the Olympic torch relay would enter Tibet and Taiwan showed how difficult that would be.
Beijing Olympics officials included self-governed Taiwan as a "China leg" stopover along the torch relay's 130-day, 85,000-mile route, which is being billed as a "journey of harmony." But the chairman of Taiwan's Olympic Committee responded that the route was "an attempt to downgrade our sovereignty" and that the island would not participate in the relay. "We resolutely reject this," the Taiwan committee said in a statement.
Presiding over Thursday evening's Olympic torch ceremony was China's top security chief, Luo Gan, 71, who has been a vocal proponent of cracking down on "discordant elements" and others perceived to threaten China's stability.
