A defendant in China's largest work injury claim was jailed for
refusing to carry out the court's order to pay compensation.
The Taishun County People's Court in eastern China's Zhejiang
Province sentenced on Thursday Wang Yunfu to three year's
imprisonment for his deliberate failure to fulfill court's
order.
Wang was among the defendants sued in 2001 by a group of 148
farmers, mostly from Taishun County, for an unprecedented damage
compensation of 208 million yuan (about 28.8 million U. S. dollars)
for the lung disease they said they developed when working as
tunnel diggers in 1993.
According to the farmers, they were employed by the defendants
(there are a total of 10 defendants in the case including the
Taishun County Tunnel Engineering Company, the Taishun County Local
Civil Engineering Company, the transport department of the Liaoning
Provincial government, as well as several individuals) in 1993 to
dig the Wujialiang Tunnel on the highway linking Shenyang and Benxi
cities, both in northeast China's Liaoning Province.
They claim that the quartzite in the tunnel has a silicon
dioxide content as high as 97.6 percent, but the defendants took no
preventive measures to effectively protect the farmers from
silicosis, a disease resulting from the chronic inhalation of
silicon dust and leading to persistent coughing, shortness of
breath and tuberculosis.
Nine of the employed farmers had died from the disease.
The Intermediate People's Court in Wenzhou city ruled later that
year that the farmer plaintiffs should get a work injury
compensation of more than 60 million yuan, rather than the 208
million yuan they wanted.
Wang was sentenced to five years in jail from 2002 for
malpractice, and to pay 10 million yuan for compensation, the rest
of the compensation falls onto government departments in Liaoning
Province.
But so far Wang have only paid 16 percent of his due fine while
he was "economically ample to pay for the entire compensation",
according to the Intermediate People's Court in Wenzhou city.
"His action has severely hindered the lives of the farmers, and
is a direct violation of Chinese criminal law," said a report of
the court.
According to Chinese criminal law, whoever refuses to carry out
legally effective judgments or orders of people's courts while he
has ability to do so shall, if the circumstances are serious, be
sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of up to three years, criminal
detention or a fine.
(Xinhua News Agency January 26, 2008)