E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.6 page 18 imprisoned for non-violent related offences (e.g. leading a counter-revolutionary group, engaging in counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement) would be a milestone in China’s effort to ratify the ICCPR. 61. After the 1997 changes, political dissidents, journalists, writers, lawyers, human rights defenders, Falun Gong practitioners, and members of the Tibetan and Uighur ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities were often prosecuted as a result of having exercised their human rights to freedom of speech, assembly, association or religion. They are often sentenced to long prison terms for political crimes such as endangering national security through undermining the unity of the country, subversion or unlawfully supplying State secrets to individuals outside the country.68 Although many of these prisoners deny having committed any wrongful act and, therefore, do not confess during trial (often despite undergoing torture), they sometimes change their mind after having been subjected to forced re-education while serving their prison sentences. If politically deviant and dissident behaviour is not subjected to criminal sanctions, the respective target groups, such as Falun Gong practitioners and human rights defenders, are often subjected to years of administrative detention, such as RTL, for having disturbed the social order or similar petty offences. 62. Many prisoners serving sentences for political crimes and detainees subjected to RTL who submitted complaints to the Special Rapporteur or whom he personally met in detention, claimed that the disproportionate, discriminatory and unjust deprivation of personal liberty (often for a very long period of time) together with the forced re-education system to which they were subjected caused more severe pain and suffering than the physical torture they might have endured during interrogation by the police. Indeed, some of these measures of re-education through coercion, humiliation and punishment aim at altering the personality of detainees up to the point of even breaking their will. 63. In response to the Special Rapporteur’s characterization of forced re-education as a form of inhuman or degrading treatment, the Chinese authorities advanced several arguments in written comments of 25 January 2006 on the preliminary draft report, including that re-education is premised on helping detainees re-enter society and that since many detainees “are led to a life of crime because they love leisure and hate labour and resort to illegal means to gain others’ property”, prisons and re-education through labour facilities organize appropriate work “in order to cultivate abilities and habits of self-reliance and prevent problems such as poor mental health because they have nothing to do”. Furthermore, the Special Rapporteur was informed that, in order to further enforce the law in a civilized manner, China’s Ministry of Justice Prison Bureau has begun training psychotherapists in the prison system with national professional accreditation in order to prevent and eliminate torture of prison inmates. According to China, “at present nearly 90 per cent of China’s prisons have begun this work and more than 1,000 prison system psychotherapists have already been trained”.69 64. In the opinion of the Special Rapporteur, methods used in the system of RTL in China, and similar methods of re-education in prisons, pretrial detention centres, and other institutions often go beyond legitimate rehabilitation measures provided for in article 10 of the ICCPR. Indeed, some of these measures strike at the very core of the human right to personal integrity, dignity and humanity, as protected by articles 7 and 10 of the ICCPR, as well as articles 1 and 16