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| March 25, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
|  | China Beijing looks to dodge human rights censure again By Antoaneta Bezlova BEIJING - A deepening disillusionment with China's human rights situation has prompted the United States to introduce a censure motion against Beijing at the annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, at the meeting which opened on Monday, asked the 53-member rights commission to rebuff any attempt by Beijing to stifle debate on its human rights record, as has been the case in the past. In the history of the commission, a resolution to rebuke China for its alleged rights violations has never come to a vote. Previous attempts at censure have failed in the face of heavy lobbying by Beijing with developing nations and European Union countries. This year, state-run newspapers in China have been quick to predict that Washington's sponsorship of a resolution will fail as it has in past years. Yet even if Beijing succeeds in eluding UN censure on human rights, it has become clear by now that ''constructive dialogue on human rights'' is a poor substitute for multilateral pressure in China's case. Earlier this month, Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, publicly denounced China for going backward on human rights protection. She said the country's violations of freedom of speech, religion and association had worsened in the past year even though Chinese officials praised their own record as the best ever. Last month, the US State Department made public its annual human rights report, which noted too that China's record had worsened over the past year. The report detailed the crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement, continued abuses in Tibet and ongoing religious and political suppression. Beijing's routine defense against accusations like these is a counter-offensive, charging Washington with wielding a rights stick and using ''double standards'' on the issue. Ahead of this year's Geneva meeting, the Communist Party's newspaper, the People's Daily, and the People's Liberation Army Daily ran editorials accusing the West of ''interventionism and power politics''. ''Western countries wave the human rights big stick to interfere in the internal affairs of developing countries,'' the People's Liberation Army Daily said on Monday. ''The United States is eager to attack the human rights situation in other countries but is tight-lipped about its own notorious human rights record,'' says Professor Zheng Hansheng, director of the Human Rights Research Center at the People's University. ''Isn't that a demonstration of hegemony?'' Instead of having its human rights record scrutinized annually in the UN's highest human rights forum, Beijing prefers conducting bilateral, behind-the-scenes, discussions on human rights with major Western countries. To Beijing's great satisfaction, since 1997, first Canada and Australia, and later the European Union, have agreed to hold bilateral informal dialogues on human rights, instead of censuring China in public. These are held in private and involve no formal commitment to reporting the results or achieving any goals. Freed of the pressure to fend off resolutions on its human rights record, Beijing has cracked down on the country's fledgling opposition, the China Democracy Party, the Falun Gong and unofficial churches, in what human rights groups describe as the worst oppression in more than 10 years. ''We are seriously questioning the substitution of quiet diplomacy for multilateral pressure as a way to effectively improve the human rights situation in the People's Republic of China,'' says a joint statement by international human rights groups which are seeking EU support in tabling a resolution on China. Signed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and four other rights groups, the statement argues that pushing for dialogue on human rights is becoming ''an end in itself''. ''Dialogue without pressure in the face of persistent gross violations of human rights is simply appeasement and degrades the authority of international human rights standards,'' it said. Chinese officials have gone so far as to claim that even the crackdown on Falun Gong, feared by the government as a threat to communist rule, is being done with the purpose of safeguarding human rights. ''Banning Falun Gong doesn't affect Chinese people's freedom of religion, it is an act of protecting this freedom,'' declared Ye Xiaowen, director-general of the State Administration of Religious Affairs, late last year when China began arresting and trying Falun Gong adherents. Three months after the government banned Falun Gong in July, China's Parliament passed an anti-cult law which provided a legal framework for the crackdown. Yet the law's application has been erratic and in violation of basic civic rights of Chinese citizens. In the case of Li Xiaomei and Li Xiaobing, two middle-aged sisters who ran a bookshop in Beijing and once sold Falun Gong books, the anti-cult law was applied retroactively. After having been held incommunicado for six months, the two Lis were tried in secrecy and sentenced in January to six and seven years for something that was not a crime at the time. The women, now in labor camps, sold the books well before the state declared Falun Gong an ''evil sect'' and well before it enacted its anti-cult legislation. Such application of law defies normal rules. But in early March, during a United Nations-sponsored regional conference here on human rights, designed to boost public awareness and participation in monitoring, Chinese officials stated the Falun Gong crackdown was a demonstration of how the country enjoyed the ''rule of law''. (Inter Press Service) | |||||||||
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