China's New Law on Detentions Puts Spotlight on 'Black Jails' China's highest legislative body is expected to approve changes on Wednesday for dealing with accused criminals that the government says will protect suspects" rights and activists worry enshrine a loophole that would legalize secret detentions for many political dissidents. The official China Daily described the proposed changes as "aimed at further protecting the rights of suspects in custody and preventing forced confessions." The revised law no longer includes an explicit provision allowing for secret detention of up to six months, known to critics as "the disappearance clause," which appeared in an earlier draft of the measure released in September but was removed after a comment period that included more than 80,000 responses, The New York Times reported. According to the Chinese state-run report this week: Wang Zhaoguo, a senior lawmaker, explained to deputies on Monday that the draft now states that public security bureaus must inform a suspect's family within 24 hours of their detention. The only exceptions, he added, would be when the case is "related to State security or terrorism," or if informing the family would "impede an investigation" That appeared to many activists to be a wide loophole for Chinese authorities, who have used charges of subversion to silence challenges to the state from political dissidents. "I think this shows the present political mentality of lack of confidence and of fear," the dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, who was himself detained secretly last year, told Reuters last week. "This is a massive threat to the judicial system and to citizens" security." Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher on Asia at Human Rights Watch, translated a message posted to Twitter on Tuesday by one of China's best known activists. Another message, posted by Mr. Hu on Monday, described the situation with an allusion to George Orwell: "We are in 1984." Mr. Bequelin wrote this month in an Op-Ed article for The Times that "these secret detentions would be carried out in venues controlled by the police outside of regular detention facilities, greatly increasing the likelihood of ill-treatment." Indeed, proposed changes have prompted a renewed discussion of China's so-called "black jails" - detention sites that operate outside official sanction. These sites, of which there are estimated to be dozens around Beijing alone, last drew widespread attention when the National People's Congress met in 2009. At that meeting, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao described how China's system of petitioning the government could be used to resolve social problems. The trouble was, many who tried to seek redress for their grievances found themselves locked up. Melissa Chan, a Beijing correspondent for Al Jazeera English who covered the world of informal, private detention centers in 2009, published a video report on Tuesday that found business still booming for some operators of these sites, who were no more welcoming to her questions this time than they had been last time. "I knew about these hotels," she wrote in a blog post accompanying her video report. We had investigated them back in 2009. Cheap places rented out by the block to officials to set up as ad-hoc prisons, known as "black jails."" The sites are not legally sanctioned and the government has denied that they are used in any official capacity. When asked about the sites during a 2009 news conference, a government spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, told Ms. Chan "things like this do not exist in China." "China is a country with the rule of law," Ms. Jiang said. And everything is handled according to the law. In December, the South China Morning Post reported that the government had embarked on a six-month campaign to crackdown on these places in Beijing. At the time, Yiyi Lu, an Asia scholar in Beijing with the research institute Chatham House, observed on The Wall Street Journal's China blog that many of the "black jails" exist to prevent out-of-town petitioners from airing their complaints in Beijing and that the central government could curb their activities if it changed its approach. As long as the central government remains strong in asking local governments to control the number of petitioners flowing into Beijing but weak in meting out punishment when local governments achieve their targets through dubious means, it does not look likely that abuse of petitioners would stop.