In China, tainted milk trial kept under wraps
An opaque legal system clashes with an inquisitive public. Former executives of Sanlu Group are accused in the melamine-tainted milk that killed six babies and sickened 300,000.
Reporting from Shijiazhuang, China — Inside a courthouse cordoned off by yellow tape and a phalanx of police, the alleged perpetrators of China's tainted-milk scandal are being brought to trial here. But the sensational consumer safety case has been shrouded in so much secrecy that it is hard to say whether justice is in fact being done.
On Wednesday, the most significant defendant, Tian Wenhua, chairwoman of the now-bankrupt Sanlu Group, admitted that her company had delayed for months reporting that its infant formula contained the additive melamine, which causes kidney stones. Tainted formula killed at least six babies and sickened about 300,000 others.
China has made a big show of the trial, releasing courtroom video of the defendants being paraded before the judges in yellow-and-black prison garb. But the public has seen only snippets and images, and all but a few carefully screened journalists from government-owned news media have been excluded.
Parents and their lawyers, many of whom traveled from across the country in hopes of seeing the trial, are also personae non gratae at the well- secured courthouse here in Shijiazhuang, about 190 miles south of Beijing.
"There is no transparency in the process. They are behaving like there is something to hide," said Teng Biao, a Beijing lawyer who has been trying to bring a lawsuit on behalf of 111 parents. "They are completely excluding the victims."
The case is turning into a showdown between the Chinese government's opaque legal system and a consumer culture that increasingly clamors for information and accountability.
Parents whose babies were sickened by the melamine have set up their own websites (one is called jieshibaobao.com, which translates to "rockbabies.com") and trade text messages about the latest developments.
Although they have been barred from the courthouse, privately owned Chinese news outlets have stationed dozens of reporters behind the police lines, trying to interview people as they come and go.
"This is a case that the whole country is watching, actually all the world," said Zhang Chen, senior editor for an online news service and one of the journalists in the scrum Tuesday.
Courts throughout China have refused to hear the parents' lawsuits, and lawyers who have tried to file them have been threatened with disbarment, lawyer Teng said.
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