China jails reporter for leaking 'state secrets'

A court in south China jailed a Chinese journalist for 10 years on Saturday for illegally providing state secrets to overseas organisations, the state-run Xinhua news agency said. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in February that China had the most journalists in prison, 42, of any country for the sixth year in a row.
Prosecutors in Hunan province told the Intermediate People's Court that Shi Tao, 37, a former news editor for the Contemporary Business News in provincial capital Changsha, e-mailed notes he took at an April 2004 internal newspaper meeting to an unnamed overseas publication, Xinhua said without naming the publication.
A confidential "important document" had been read out at the meeting and several overseas Internet portals published the content of Shi's e-mail time and again, Xinhua said. It did not reveal the contents on the e-mail.
"The National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets later certified the contents leaked overseas by Shi as top state secrets," Xinhua said.
China broadly defines as a state secret anything that affects the security and interests of the state, but the limits are vague and can include political news.
Rights groups say the laws are arbitrary enough to be manipulated for political purposes. China is known to have jailed dissidents on charges of leaking state secrets.
China last October formally arrested New York Times researcher Zhao Yan for revealing state secrets, believed to be news that former leader Jiang Zemin was retiring from politics, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.
Zhao is yet to go on trial.
On Thursday, China released journalist Chen Yafei from prison after serving more than 14 years of a 15-year sentence for inciting rebellion around the time of the 1989 democracy movement, rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders said.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed on the night of June 3-4, 1989, when the army advanced on Tiananmen Square to end nearly two months of student-led democracy protests.