RIGHTS-CHINA: UN Should Criticise Beijing, Say Activists

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 10 1998 (IPS) - Chinese and Tibetan dissidents criticised Beijing’s human rights record Thursday – the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – and urged the United Nations to enforce major rights agreements.

Harry Wu, a prominent Chinese dissident who won his release to the United States earlier this year, argued that China’s recent human rights gestures, including its signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, amounted to very little.

“If you carefully read the 1954 Chinese Constitution, they guarantee all sorts of rights,” Wu said. “So why do we applaud them for a declaration now? They’re playing a game.”

Wu’s argument was buttressed by the appearance at the United Nations Thursday of Yao Zhenxian, the prominent pro-democracy activist who fled Shanghai this week following a crackdown on the Chinese Democratic Party, of which he is a founding member.

Just one day after arriving here on a special U.S. visa, Yao said that the Beijing government was rounding up members of his party – formed in June after U.S. President Bill Clinton visited China – and that he could be imprisoned if he returned.

Yao called detention “a necessity and a way of life” for all members of the pro-democracy movement. Released last April from prison on what he said were trumped-up pornography charges, Yao said his own detention included instances of torture and beatings.

“I would see people being tortured for 15, 16 hours,” Yao contended. “Some prisoners would jab needles into their abdomens in order to be able to receive medical treatment so that they wouldn’t be forced to work.”

Wu, who detailed the growth of China’s prison labour industry, said that the reality of Chinese prisons was a far cry from the Beijing description of them as places where inmates worked eight- hour days and received full medical benefits.

“They make it sound like some kind of vocational training programme,” Wu said. Yet when he tried to document the nature of prison labour, he added, the government arrested him for trying to disclose ‘state secrets’.

China has tried to polish its image on human rights in recent years, with the release of activists like Wu taken as a sign that Beijing intended amending its poor record.

While the signing of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights this year had a limited effect Yao believed that, because China had joined the treaty, it may be less likely to impose lengthy jail terms on the Chinese Democratic Party members.

But the fate of the fledgling party remained an example of how limited Beijing’s reforms have been generally. Ten members of the party were arrested last week, with one of the group’s leaders, Wang Youcai, scheduled to go on trial on Dec. 17.

Yao said the arrests resulted after Beijing decided that the Democratic Party “expanded too quickly”, establishing a large presence in the populous Sichuan province.

Following the arrests, Yao and his family, who helped finance the Democratic Party and its predecessors, decided to flee to the United States, although he still planned to return to China despite the threat of imprisonment.

Nor is Beijing’s record at home its only problem. The 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration also offered Tibetans opposed to China’s military rule of the region since 1949 a chance to protest its ongoing crackdown there.

“Our problem is almost as old as the Universal Declaration,” said Dawa Tsering, U.S. representative of Tibet’s leader, the Dalai Lama. “All the fundamental rights are strictly controlled by the central government.”

Tsering contended that China continues to repress Tibet’s Buddhist monks, particularly by trying to replace the monks’ Panchen Lama, a central religious figure, with one chosen by Beijing.

Tsering argued that commercial and other national interests among European Union members and the United States have prevented countries from speaking out more clearly against China’s actions. “If human rights issues are bartered with individual national interests, it is a very sad case,” he said.

Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, delivered a more conciliatory message for the commemoration of the Declaration, citing the document’s universal principles.

“Some governments have contended that the standards of human rights laid down by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are those advocated by the West and do not apply to Asia and other parts of the Third World because of differences in culture, social and economic development,” he said in a statement. “I do not share this view, and I am convinced that the majority of ordinary people do not support it either.”

“The Universal Declaration only has one version,” Wu added. “It doesn’t have a Chinese version and an American version.”