Baby milk powder victims lose legal proxy

• Source: Global Times
• [01:26 August 11 2009]
• Comments

Registration headaches

Parents carry a victim of the Sanlu milk scandal in a Wuhan maternity hospital, Hubei Province, on September 16 last year. Xu offered to represent all the victims of the scandal in their quest for justice.

There were 386,916 official and unofficial NGOs registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs by the end of 2007. That number only accounts for NGOs registered at civil affairs bureaus across the country. A far larger number of NGOs are either registered at local administrations for industry and commerce or not registered at all, according to Lu.

The Beijing Yirenping Center belongs to the larger group. It was visited by a police officer and two plainclothes officers from the Cultural Market Administrative Law Enforcement Office of Beijing on July 29. The officers said they received a report that the center was involved in publishing without a license. They searched the center and confiscated more than 90 copies of China’s Anti-Discrimination Legal Action Newsletter.

Lu explained to them that printing documents like fliers and newsletters is a major task of NGOs. Otherwise they would not be able to publicize relevant laws and information to the public.

The newsletters were published in small numbers and given out free at seminars, not public places. Therefore they should not be taken as a publication.