Beijing cancels sentence for elderly women

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Two elderly women have won a reprieve from a sentence to one year in labor camps handed down after they sought permission for a protest during this month's Beijing Olympics, a rights group said.

Human Rights in China said a Beijing municipal committee on August 29 rescinded its decision to sentence Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, to a year of "re-education through labor", less than two weeks after the decision was delivered.

The two had applied for permits to demonstrate in officially designated "protest zones" during the Games.

China said that none of the 77 applications by citizens to protest legally in the designated Beijing parks had been approved. The case was among examples cited by human rights groups of a Chinese crackdown on dissent as it hosted the Olympics, which ended last Sunday.

Several rights groups accused the Chinese government of breaking human rights commitments that helped Beijing to get the Games, while charging that the International Olympic Committee and foreign governments looked the other way.

A Beijing spokesman, Wang Wei, had dismissed the criticism as the work of biased foreign media and played up the positive attitude toward the Games among the athletes and most Chinese citizens.

Human Rights in China has said 24 protesters -- critics of the Communist Party and their family members -- were detained or put under watch before the Olympics opened on August 8.

The New York-based group welcomed the decision to rescind the sentence for Wu and Wang.

"In the glare of international attention, it seems that even the government itself has acknowledged that this punishment was harsh and inappropriate," said Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, in a statement.

It also criticized China's "re-education through labor" system and urged its abolition, saying it violated international standards of human rights and was in direct conflict with the Chinese government's own principle of rule by law.

(Reporting by Edmund Klamann; Editing by Alex Richardson)