The tortured Chinese rights lawyers, from left: Wang Cheng, Jiang Tianyong and Tang Jitian.
"His head covered in a black hood, lawyer Tang Jitian recalls being taken into a room and hearing the sound of a rope being pulled. The handcuffs behind him were jerked upward and soon he was dangling in the air. 'I got hoisted with my head facing down, feet off the ground and butt in the air,' Tang said in an interview with The Associated Press. 'Five or six people were hitting me and kicking me. All I heard was "thud, thud, thud," throughout.' Tang is among a group of four Chinese rights lawyers who say they were tortured by police when they were rounded up in late March after protesting outside a detention center in Jiansanjiang, a farming community in northeastern China. They had joined several people shouting to demand information about relatives believed locked up inside because they were members of Falun Gong - banned as a cult though they claim to be a peaceful spiritual movement... Their accounts raise doubts about commitments by Chinese authorities to curb the use of torture, establish rule of law and ensure due process for those accused of wrongdoing. Their experience is part of a broad crackdown over the past year on rights lawyers and other activists seeking to hold authorities accountable to the country's constitution and to their own stated goals of boosting fairness in Chinese society... 'China's legal system is regressing,' said Wang Jianxun, a legal scholar at the China University of Political Science and Law. 'I have seen no sign of progress, but rather that the overall conditions are deteriorating.'"