CHINA: Two retired cadres of the Chinese Communist Party have petitioned the State Council, the Procurator's Office, the Supreme Court, the Municipal Court, the People's Congress and individual Party leaders in Beijing over what they claim is a serious injustice done to their daughters.

The case they present raises disturbing questions about the way the Public Security Bureau in China uses the court system to administer harsh punishment to people apparently innocent under Chinese law of any crime.

It comes on the eve of a visit to Beijing tomorrow by the UN Commissioner of Human Rights, Mrs. Mary Robinson, to sign a technical accord on improving legal procedures in China.

They claim that their daughters, Ms Li Xiaomei (46), and Ms Li Xiaobing (48), who ran a bookshop in Beijing, were arrested, detained without charge for 94 days, then after a further three months detention sentenced to long jail terms, for selling books and other materials promoting Falun Gong.

But as the petition points out, their daughters were arrested before Falun Gong was banned as a cult last July. Moreover the books at the time were not illegal. They had been published by the Chinese Broadcasting Publishing House, bore official bar codes from the National Publication Administration Bureau, and one for a time was on the list of 10 best sellers in the Beijing Youth Daily.

The sequence of events as described in the petition is as follows. In April, followers of Falun Gong, which was not then banned, demonstrated in large numbers outside government headquarters in Beijing over the beating of some members by police in Tianjin. The government was outraged and began to denounce the movement, whose exiled leader, Mr. Li Hongzhi, lives in New York and claims spiritual powers.

The two women were arrested on July 20th and their possessions, including savings accounts, fax machine, VCR, tape recorder and mobile phone, were confiscated. Falun Gong was not banned until two days later, on July 22nd.

The sisters were not allowed access to family or lawyers. No one knew where they were held. On October 22nd their parents, Mr. Li Yi and Ms Nie Zhen, were told they had been charged with illegally selling banned books and other Falun Gong materials and making an illegal turnover which "seriously disturbed the proper marketing order".

On January 28th Ms Li Xaiomei was sentenced to seven years in prison and Ms Li Xiaobing, who was married a week before the arrest, six years, at a court hearing in Beijing which the parents were not allowed to attend. Both were fined heavily. "Most of the old cadres suffered the same experience during the Great Cultural Revolution (1965-1975)," stated the couple, who have been staunch communists all their lives.

"In order to prevent the same thing from happening again after the Great Cultural Revolution, the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China formulated the related instructions so that it would not be allowed secretly to detail people again." They had petitioned the government, because "this is obviously a very unjust case," Ms Nie Zhen said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Beijing.

"If the Chinese Government do not return the fairness and the innocence to my daughters, we hope the international human rights organisations should help us correct this problem."