RIGHTS-CHINA: Children’s Supporters Clash with China on ICC

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

ROME, Jun 16 1998 (IPS) - The two faces of modern China were on view here Tuesday as Chinese delegates offered fulsome – if qualified – support for an International Criminal Court (ICC), at the same time as Beijing blocked the holding of a U.N. news conference by children’s advocates.

On the one hand, Chinese envoy Wang Guangya said Beijing “stands for the establishment of the ICC” even as he insisted that the Court should await the consent of states being investigated before conducting its work. On the other, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and some U.N. officials confirmed that the Chinese delegation ordered speakers to be locked out of a briefing sponsored by ‘Terre des hommes’ concerning child victims of conflicts, forcing them to make their case on the plight of Chinese orphans from a U.N. hallway.

“The Court should not become a tool of political struggles or a means of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs,” Wang said. “Meanwhile, the ICC should not compromise the principal role of the UN, its Security Council in particular, in safeguarding world peace and security.”

In order to prevent biased prosecutions, Wang argued, the Court should reflect a “cautious attitude” in which national sovereignty and security, as well as national legal principles, are respected. In common cause with the United States, China is envisioning a Court which would require either permission from involved states or from the 15-nation Security Council – or possibly both – before it could try any cases.Those views could sink the ICC statute if applied, rights activists beleived.

Wang argued that, rather than force a vote over such matters as Security Council control, the ICC drafters should try to act on “a basis of democracy and equality” in which all countries’ views were included. “The statute should be passed by consensus rather than by vote,” he said. In order to ensure its passage, the Court should allow “maximal flexibility” in defining its jurisdiction.

Ironically, while Wang spoke of the need for democracy in the ICC meetings, China was ensuring that the Terre des hommes speakers were unable to plead their own case on behalf of including the protection of children’s rights in the ICC’s brief.

Marina Rini, spokeswoman for Terre des hommes, said that Beijing requested that the briefing not be held after learning Monday that Dr Zhang Shu-Yun, who heads the Chinese Orphans Welfare Concern Association in London, would be speaking about the treatment of Chinese orphans.

Zhang told Terra Viva that she has become used to being prevented from speaking. “It’s always like that,” she said. “But they are losing face this way. This is not China – (here) we must have the freedom to speak.”

Zhang previpously attracted Beijing’s ire by drawing attention to what she claimed has been the abandonment of children in Chinese orphanages who failed to win the attention of adoptive parents.

“These children are healthy in the beginning,” said Zhang, who worked as a doctor in a Shanghai orphanage for five years, said. “But they choose some children for adoption and then abandon the rest … It was like a business for China, since a lot of old people who didn’t have children would go to Shanghai.”

The going rate for healthy children could be as high as 5,000 U.S. dollars, she said. For children who were not wanted – including disabled, mentally disturbed or rowdy ones – the orphanages made no effort to provide food or medical care, Zhang contended. She said she has been instructed to deny food or medicine to such children.

“The hospital administration deliberately allowed the orphans die,” she said. “My memory of the child who died in my arms, my nightmare of all those skeletal baby corpses, will always stay with me.”

Zhang’s appeal may have been too specific to be heard during what is a conference to work out a treaty, said Susan Markham, a U.N. spokeswoman. “This is a negotiating conference – not a conference to discuss issues.”

More than one country had objected to the briefing, she added.

Markham said the Terre des hommes briefing was cancelled because it lacked appropriate sponsorship, either from the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court or from any individual nation. The lack of sponsorship, she said, was only found out after the news conference had been tentatively scheduled. “We don’t hold individual press conferences for individual NGOs,” she said.

According to Rini, the Coalition was discouraged away from its previous support of the briefing because of worries that its rights at the ongoing ICC conference would be removed if it sponsored the Terre des hommes speakers. Several nations, including Italy and Senegal, also expressed concerns about providing sponsorship, she added.

The speakers, however, continued to talk to reporters even after they were locked out of the U.N. press briefing room at the FAO secretariat. U.N. security staff allowed the speakers – who also included the parents of kidnapped and abused children in Belgium, and family members of children killed by terrorism in Algeria and ‘disappeared’ in Argentina – to conduct their briefing informally in an FAO hallway.

Michel Hoffman, programme director of Terre des hommes, argued that, regardless of the lock-out, the parents “deserve an opportunity to be heard.” He said that the crimes against children which they had discussed should make the case for the inclusion of crimes against children as ‘crimes against humanity’ in the ICC draft statute.

Zhang urged governments here to support the ‘Lausanne Appeal’, a call for the inclusion of crimes against children in the statute. “Let us form an obstacle against evil,” she said.