Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said yesterday that abuse of suspects and prisoners remained widespread in China. Treatment was far worse than international norms, despite recent signs of improvement.

Mr Nowak’s investigation was the first ever permitted by china and, as such, represents a breakthrough in human rights. Despite this, he said he had been obstructed by security officials, who intimidated some victims and their relatives or prevented them from seeing him.

However, he was able to visit prisons, detention centres and “re-education” labour camps in beijing and the troubled regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as interviewing academics, justice officials and detainees. Among the prisoners, Mr Nowak said he observed a “palpable level of fear and self-censorship”, which he had not seen in missions to other countries.

Human rights groups say brutality and degradation are common in chinese prisons, where many of the victims are from the Tibetan and Uighur ethnic minorities, political dissidents, followers of the banned Falun Gong sect and members of underground churches.

Although china outlawed torture in 1996, its definition of illegal acts those leaving physical marks is so narrow that interrogators can employ a wide range of methods contravening UN standards. Suspects are manacled in contorted positions, deprived of sleep and subjected to psychological torture. Some techniques have been given names, such as “reversing an aeroplane”, where a victim must remain standing, bent double, with arms splayed upwards and backwards.

But one big problem, he said, was that officers remained under heavy pressure to obtain confessions. Even after imprisonment, those who refuse to admit guilt are subjected to “re-education”, aimed at breaking their will. Mr Nowak called this “inhumane and degrading punishment”.

A growing range of officials are being cited as perpetrators of torture, including administrative police, judges, court clerks and court police; village and party leaders, members of Mutual Defense Teams , and many types of security official outside the regular police force but seconded, contracted or working part time for them. These have included Factory Administrative Management Forces, and Municipal Supervision Brigades

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