Political Prisoners

At a time when China is touting its Olympic mascots, stadiums and hospitality, a San Francisco-based human rights group has suggested that it add one more feature for the Games: the first "Olympic pardon" of political prisoners. The Dui Hua Foundation made its appeal public Thursday, offering an approach it believes could help Beijing improve a reputation battered in recent months by its Tibet crackdown, Darfur policies and the protests dogging the global relay of the Olympic torch.

After more than a decade in a Shanghai prison, a Chinese-American entrepreneur whose case illustrated the perils of doing business in China and the nation's tenuous rule of law was released Wednesday on parole. Jude Shao, 45, had about five years left on a 16-year sentence for tax evasion and fraud -- allegations that his supporters say were false.

Sequestered in a dank prison cell here, Ethiopia's biggest reggae star awaits trial in a deadly hit-and-run case that has galvanized the nation. Federal prosecutors say Tewodros Kassahun, dubbed the Bob Marley of Ethiopia, fled after striking a homeless boy with his BMW. They call it a case of celebrity bad behavior. Fans say the singer, also known as Teddy Afro, is being framed because of his music's perceived anti-government message.

Anwar Bunni's wife had seen this moment often in her nightmares: the secret police emerging from the shadows, forcing her activist husband into a waiting car. After all these years, it felt like a spell had been broken. "You're waiting for the beast to arrive, and finally it comes," Raghida Issa said. "I felt relief." But their trouble had just begun. Bunni, a vocal critic of the Syrian regime, was held for nearly a year before a military judge sentenced him last month to five years in prison.

An Uzbek court freed a rights activist and suspended her seven-year jail sentence after she confessed to all the charges against her and criticized international rights groups from a cage in the courtroom. The United States had criticized the jail term handed down last week to Umida Niyazova, a translator for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari was interrogated for four months by Iranian officials before being thrown into this city's notorious Evin prison, her U.S. employer said Thursday. Esfandiari's troubles began in December when knife-wielding masked men stopped her on her way to the airport and seized her travel documents.

A court sentenced a farmworker organizer to five years in prison, making him the seventh Vietnamese political activist jailed for subversion since March. Western political analysts and diplomats have cited Sunday's National Assembly elections and President Nguyen Minh Triet's planned summer visit to the United States to explain the timing of what rights groups have described as a crackdown by the ruling Communist Party.

Myanmar's military government extended the house arrest of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi for another year, defying an outpouring of international appeals for the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's freedom. Suu Kyi, 60, has spent more than 11 of the last 17 years in detention and most of the last four years confined to her residence in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

The government has freed one of the founding members of an opposition party after he served nearly eight years in prison for subversion, a Hong Kong-based rights group said. Mao Qingxiang, a founder of the now-defunct China Democracy Party, has returned to his home in Zhejiang province, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. The group said more than 23 party members were still in prison.

For Vietnamese Americans promoting democracy in their homeland, the photo became an instant icon: Father Nguyen Van Ly -- a fierce anti-communist -- being muzzled by the hand of a Vietnamese guard during his government trial in March. The Roman Catholic priest was found guilty of being a national security threat and sentenced to eight years, but Vietnamese Americans have found a way to continue his message through a billboard campaign featuring the dramatic courtroom photo.