Amnesty International: China, U.S. abuse prisoners

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Amnesty International's release of its 40th annual human rights report on Wednesday showed little improvement in global human rights conditions.

Amnesty International Senior Deputy Executive Director Curt Goering spoke with CNN Anchor Colleen McEdwards and accused China and the United States of being significant abusers of prisoners.

McEDWARDS: I wonder if we could start with China. What did you find about its human rights record?

GOERING: Well, China is one of those countries where when one speaks of the global human rights situation, one has to discuss the situation in China because it is really an unfortunate one. There are literally tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience, many of them members of the Falun Gong movement -- the spiritual and exercise movement -- who've been detained, and many of them in re-education-through-labor camps for doing nothing more than practicing their beliefs, non-violent exercise of their right to freedom of association.

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We find in Chinese police stations, in Chinese jails across the country and in numerous provinces torture on a systematic and too often widespread scale.

McEDWARDS: Mr. Goering, has there been any change in that? Was China any better in this most recent report, which was last year, than it was in previous years?

GOERING: Well, in China we've seen in the last year a sustained major crackdown on virtually all kinds of dissent. So that situation hasn't improved at all. We can talk about a fewer number of executions in China although China still carries out the largest number of executions of any country in the world, over a thousand last year. And while this is on the decline, it still is at an alarmingly high level, especially when one considers that many of these verdicts have in effect been decided in advance before the trial.

McEDWARDS: And what did you find around the world in terms of the number of political killings? I see here that they're up and it looks quite steep.

GOERING: Yeah, we found that countries -- 61 countries -- have carried out political killings. This is a situation where governments don't even bother to arrest the individuals. They identify and target them for elimination and kill them on the street, their places of business, sometimes at their homes. But they're simply eliminated without any process at all. This is a really disturbing trend, especially as we've noted an increase -- as you noted -- in the last year.

McEDWARDS: And yet you found fewer disappearances -- to use that word -- than in previous years. What does that mean?

GOERING: Well, I'm not sure that number is all that significant in larger terms. Although when governments hold people and disappear them it is always an alarming situation because they disappear and the government denies any accountability. And, although the number of countries declined, the number of cases remained at a fairly similar level to previous years.

McEDWARDS: And the United States is mentioned in the report, not just because some of the states that have the death penalty, but what else?

GOERING: Beyond the death penalty, and I should mention the United States belongs to the group of five countries that carry out 90 percent of the world's executions along with China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But in the United States we also find growing levels of police brutality in police departments, sheriff departments across the country, large cities and small.

There's a growing prisoner population in the United States, over two million now and along with that comes abuse in prison, the rape of women in custody, widespread -- in certain locations -- custodial sexual misconduct, the rapid spread of electric shock technology, stun guns, electronic riot shields, tasers, torture -- really -- which can be easily inflicted and has been. And with this trend towards punishment and revenge rather than rehabilitation here in the United States, the abuses are on the increase here with respect to prisons.