(New York) - Prime Minister John Howard's failure to tackle human rights issues in China undermines Australia's bid to lead the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Human Rights Watch said today.
After meeting with China's top leaders on August 18-19 in Beijing, Howard dismissed international efforts to pressure China on its human rights record and insisted that quiet diplomacy was producing sufficient results. In 1997, during a previous visit by Howard to Beijing, Australia agreed to begin a bilateral human rights dialogue with China and dropped its sponsorship of a U.N. resolution censuring China. Since that time, the United States and European Union have also failed to table resolutions critical of China.
Australia is currently lobbying for election as chair of the Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations top human rights body that meets annually in Geneva. The rights record of countries seeking to chair the Commission has come under intense scrutiny following the controversy over Libya's election to the chairmanship last year.
"Howard's statements in China undermine Australia's claims to leadership on human rights," said Rory Mungoven, Global Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch. "The experience in China shows that dialogue will not produce results without accompanying international pressure."
Human Rights Watch highlighted a range of serious human rights concerns in China that contradicted Howard's claims of progress:
- increased arrests and police violence directed at HIV-positive protestors in Henan province and refusal of central authorities to bring to justice provincial authorities responsible for the transmission of HIV through unclean blood collection practices, which may have affected as many as one million people, and perhaps more;
- eight and ten-year prison terms for four young intellectuals, Yang Zili, Xu Wei, Jin Haike, and Zhang Honghai, who used the Internet to air their thoughts about competing political ideologies;
- a severely flawed and secretive judicial process that resulted in the execution of one Tibetan, Lobsang Dondrup, and a death sentence with a two-year suspension for another, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche;
- the sentencing of two workers, Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang, to long prison terms for organizing workers to peacefully protest an allegedly corrupt bankruptcy proceeding that contributed to lost wages and pensions for thousands;
- use of the global war against terrorism as cover to discriminate against Muslims living in the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region in matters of access to education and employment, and to restrict their rights to freedom of association, assembly, belief, and expression, and;
- China's unwillingness to honor its pledges to allow visits "without conditions" by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Human Rights Watch called on Australia to commit to sponsoring a resolution addressing these issues at the Commission on Human Rights. It also pressed the Australian government to set clear benchmarks for its bilateral dialogue with China and a timetable for reforms, and to ensure greater transparency in the dialogue process.
