By 8pm the commercial centres are empty and look as if they are under a curfew.Mr Kuttab says Palestinians in the city are suffocating because Israel systematically denies them permission to build new houses. In a city partly reliant on tourism, Palestinians have not been able to build a single hotel since Israeli captured East Jerusalem in 1967.Negotiations about the final status of Jerusalem have to start, according to the Oslo Accords, by 4 May. European Union monitors wanted them shut for normal business next Saturday when the election takes place. They feared organised opponents of the election could sabotage the ballot by buying thousands of stamps and blocking access. Right-wingers in the Knesset said the closure of post offices would concede too much to the Palestinians.The effort to seal off Jerusalem from the West Bank makes little sense.

In theory posters are confined to 35 locations, though in fact they are on every wall and shop front.For weeks there was an angry dispute about voting in five post offices in Palestinian East Jerusalem. But although the 167,000 Palestinian minority in Jerusalem can vote, Israel does not want this to be seen as giving them a claim to the city.Both sides know important precedents will be set. As a result, Israel insists all the campaigning must take place indoors. Hanan Ashrawi, the best-known candidate, was manhandled by police and her car stopped when she tried to enter Jerusalem from the West Bank with posters of herself on the car window. Candidates spend much of their time trying to persuade supporters it is safe to vote. The election has highlighted the conflict over Jerusalem’s future, claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians as their capital.Palestinians will elect seven members of their council from the Jerusalem constituency, which is much larger than the city of Jerusalem itself.

PATRICK COCKBURN

Jerusalem
A warning notice in Hebrew and Arabic was posted on walls in Jerusalem yesterday telling voters that if they vote in the election for the Palestinian Council this week, they will lose their residence permits. “Please think twice before you vote,” says the poster, issued by the youth wing of Israel’s main right-wing party.It is a threat Palestinians in Jerusalem take seriously. Some academics “hold the view that this [custody for investigation] should be abolished because they believe it is in violation of the rights of the people concerned,” said Mr Wang.. The aim seems to be to provide for conditions whereby a suspect can legally be held for up to a month, in return for scrapping the “custody for investigation”.

Professor Wang Jiafu, director of Cass’s centre for human rights studies, said the draft law planned to end administrative “custody for investigation”, whereby suspects can be held without charge for long periods. By law, there is a 72-hour limit on detention without formal arrest, but in practice this is meaningless because the public security bodies can hold people during “investigations”.Mr Liu admitted that there was “abuse” of the administrative penalties. we should not do it like this.”Mr Liu confirmed that his research body received copies of HRW and Amnesty International reports, and that he had met representatives of Amnesty abroad.The academics also spoke candidly about planned amendments to China’s criminal procedure laws. “I have already proposed that it should not be done like this As for the public announcing of verdicts … He said the producer had painted “the eyes of the small children so it looks as if the child had many diseases”. But Mr Liu was surprisingly forthright about public sentencing rallies. “I have heard that some criminals are marched along the street, or [paraded] in cars or trucks,” he said.

I think more work should be done to bring down the mortality rates.”Shen Guofeng, a senior government official, directed his fire at the Channel 4 documentary, Return to the Dying Rooms. He accused the producer of telling staff at a provincial orphanage that “they should make the institute look as poor as possible so as to get more money, more funds”. It has occurred due to the carelessness of some of the staff at the welfare institute It has not been done intentionally. Nor is it the intention of the government.”Asked about the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ statistics for 1989 which showed that one quarter of orphanage inmates died that year, Mr Liu said: “I have noticed the high percentage of infant mortality rate raised by the statistics book …