Monday, 26-Aug-2002 3:30AM
YOKOHAMA, Japan, Aug 26 (AFP) - A resolution calling for China to open its psychiatric hospitals
to independent inspection, amid evidence of abuses against dissidents, was to be submitted Monday to
the general assembly of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA).
The resolution calls for the WPA to arrange an investigative mission to China to probe evidence
political dissidents are routinely detained in psychiatric institutions and forcibly treated or even
tortured.
The president of Britain's Royal College of Psychiatrists, Mike Shooter, was due to table the
resolution during the WPA assembly which was meeting in closed session on the third day of the World
Congress of Psychiatry in this port city southwest of Tokyo.
The British body unanimously approved a similar resolution at its annual general meeting in July
2001.
The WPA assembly was expected to run until around 1:00 am or 2:00 am Tuesday (1600 GMT or 1700 GMT
Monday), and the outcome of the vote on whether to adopt the resolution would only be announced
after the meeting ended, said WPA secretary general Juan Mezzich.
The move follows the publication earlier this month of a 300-page report detailing evidence of abuse
by New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch and the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP), a
foundation combating the political abuse of psychiatry.
The report said China incarcerated thousands of political dissidents in mental hospitals on a scale
reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. It also said the practice was on the rise.
Those targeted included members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, independent labor
organizers and individuals who complain about official persecution, the report said.
The principal author of the report, human rights researcher Robin Munro, said he was cautiously
optimistic the resolution would be adopted, but he expressed concern that delegates were not aware
the issue was being raised.
'The WPA has not circulated the text of the China resolution ahead of the meeting even though it's
the most important ethical question facing world psychiatry at the congress,' he said.
'It is absolutely necessary and appropriate that the WPA send this mission now ... because the WPA
in a series of declarations ...going back to 1977 ... repeatedly spells out that any
politically-based diagnosis of psychiatric illness is unacceptable,' Munro said.
Galli Viviana, a child psychiatrist from Ohio and Falun Gong practitioner, said during a congress
symposium Monday that more than 1,000 Falun Gong [practitioners] had been forced into Chinese mental
hospitals, along with Roman Catholics, Protestants and Buddhists.
Her presentation cited examples of torture including forced medication and being tied up for days on
end and submerged in water.
'There is sufficient independent evidence (of abuse for the WPA to act), particularly of non-Falun
Gong protesters -- trade unionists, people who have complained about corruption,' said Jim Birley, a
GIP board member and former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists who led a WPA inspection
team to the former Soviet Union in 1991.
'In the last few years, constantly around 3,000 people have been held in hospitals as political
cases at any one time,' he said.
Birley said even if the WPA adopted the resolution, the Chinese authorities would still have to
agree to allow investigators to visit.
'The key is whether the Chinese government thinks the WPA is an important enough body to feel enough
pressure to act,' he said.
http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/db/Qhealth-mental-china.RhZh_CaQ.html
Category: Falun Dafa in the Media
