Recently Wu Hailong, director general of the Dept. for International Organisations and Conferences of the Foreign Ministry of China (one hell of a job title) promised to adopt ’ a series of measures to enhance human rights protection by speeding up legislation on human rights’. Meanwhile the Chinese state, which executes four times more convicts than the rest of the world combined, has now introduced ‘mobile execution vans’. Prisoners are routinely executed in China, with minimal legal transparency. In the the gory past, Chinese sentenced to death were executed untidily by firing squad, but “The switch from gunshots to injections is a sign that China promotes human rights now,” says Kang Zhongwen, who designed the Jinguan Automobile Death Van. The chilling purpose-built vans offer an efficient road-worthy clinical environment where prisoners are confined to a bed, similar to an ambulance stretcher, and put to death with lethal injections. And if anyone was in doubt about corporate China’s commitment to the free market, away from all prying eyes the bodies are also ideally situated for speedy organ removal surgery to stock China’s burgeoning second-hand body part market.
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