ution provides for an independent judiciary and the right to a fair public trial but two hundred years of rampant corruption and governmental neglect has left their judicial system poorly organized. In June 1996, prisoners in some 35 Turkish prisons went on a hunger strike to protect ill-treatment and obstruction of medical treatment. Authorities have been abusing prisoners throughout the years often beating them to death. Three prisoners were beaten to death at Buca Prison in Izmir in September 1995, and four prisoners died of beatings at Umraniye Prison in Istanbul in January 1996. Members of prisoners' families staging non-violent protests in sympathy with the hunger-strike have also been ill-treated and detained for hours or days. In China reports of prison conditions are even more gruesome. Human-rights advocates charge that the Chinese government is committing legalized murder to harvest body organs form healthy prisoners. In China, human organs have become merchandise available to the privileged. There is a great demand for human organs such as kidneys among high Communist Party officials, who receive faster and better-quality health care than do ordinary citizens. According to published reports, by October 1994, 10,000 kidney transplants were performed in 90 hospitals throughout the country. About 90 percent of those kidneys came from executed prisoners. One Japanese patient admitted to paying $30,000 for a kidney. This is not a well-kept secret. The supply of marketable human organs has been extended to Hong Kong and other countries. While alive, prisoners in China are in the labor camps being forced, in the name of reform, to create wealth for the nation. They reclaim wasteland, build roads, dig reservoirs, and manufacture products for export. When dead, even their bodies are used to make additional profits for the Chinese government. In Canada prisoners reported that they were...
