China has imprisoned a growing number of people for expressing opinions on the Internet or downloading banned information from the Web, the rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday.
The London-based group said the 54 people it was aware of that had been detained or sentenced for such activities represented a 60 percent increase on November 2002.
That figure does not include an "unknown number of people (who) remain in detention for disseminating information about the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome over the Internet," the group said.
"We consider them all to be prisoners of conscience and reiterate our calls to the Chinese authorities to release them immediately and unconditionally," it said. Its full report on Internet use in China is published at its Web site, amnesty.org.
The group said those detained include students, political dissidents, professionals and practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, most of whom had been accused of "subversion" or "endangering state security."
It welcomed the release of Liu Di, a psychology student from Beijing, freed last November after being held for a year without access to her family after posting messages in an Internet chat room calling for the release of another Internet activist.
But it said "she should never have been detained in the first place."