Some excerpts of interviews I've done over the last couple of days about China and human rights:
First, Bob Rae, Liberal MP and his party's foreign affairs critic, asked how might Prime Minister Stephen Harper go about bringing up the issue of human rights when he meets Chinese President Hu Jintao:
Rae: I don't think there's any surprise. The Chinese are not surprised. First of all, you have to know the entire institutional structure of Canadian representation in Beijing and in the consulates is, in good measure, based on visiting prisons, making regular demarche, as they say, to the bureaucracy about what's happening to Mr. X, what's happening to Mr. Y and so on. This is what Canada does. This is in our DNA. We've been doing it for a long time. So no President of China is going to take offense. He will know that we've been raising all these cases and these issues.
From my own experience, when I used to do it as Premier of Ontario, they will have a very measured response. They'll say, well, what about the human rights of Aboriginal people living in Canada? They'll say I understand there are people living on the street in your city Mr. Rae. What about that? What about this? And so you get into a discussion and a debate. They're not unused to this discussion. They're not afraid of it. There's no reason for us to be afraid of it. It's part of an ongoing engagement not only with the, with the Chinese leadership but Chinese society generally about how a freer economy in all our entire historical experience, a freer economy generally leads to a freer society and that freer society generally leads to a freer politics.
The Chinese are very concerned about stability, they're very concerned about order. They're very concerned about a billion people. They're fearful of the consequences of losing that kind of control. Seems to me we just have to keep on trying to persuade them that liberty is the better way. It's something we believe in and something we should share with them.
And now, here's Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada:
Q: If you’re a political leader, how do you approach this issue?
Neve: I don’t think any of our organizations who work on human rights in China are saying scrap the trading relationship and pay no attention to it. What we have said all along is the problem is we went from one extreme to the other. We went from a time of complete deference when it came to human rights — the extent to which it was being discussed was once a year, in private, behind closed doors — and then swung to this rather haphazard number of instances of strong public comment. And neither of those is the right strategy.
We need something in between which is a comprehensive approach that takes account of the entire range of our relationship with China. It’s not just a trading relationship. It’s not just a human rights dialogue relationship. We have an immigration relationship, we have an international cooperation relationship. We have a multilateral relationship with China an ever-more muscular foreign policy presence on the world stage. We have a natural resources relationship with keen Chinese interest in a whole range of our petroleum and mining companies. What we need therefore is an approach to human rights that takes account of the entirety of that relationship and doesn’t relegate it to a file that one or two mid-level diplomats at foreign affairs are supposed to think about from time to time but makes it a paramount consideration in all aspects of how we have dealing with China. That’s what we need.
Q: Does Amnesty and other human rights groups have enough access to China to do its work?
Neve: We get a lot of information but it’s not [from sources] on the ground. China has never allowed Amnesty International into the country to do human rights research. We have been allowed in very occasionally. I was allowed in once to teach, for instance. I have other colleagues who have been allowed to go in to attend a conference but we have never been allowed to do on-the-ground human rights research, to visit prisons first-hand ourselves. That said, we have been still been able to do a wide range of work on China and we have some incredibly valuable and credible sources of information that we’ve built up over the years.
We’ve repeatedly said to the Canadian government, amongst others, that’s one indicator amongst many others of the state of human rights in China, that they remain so defiant. And it’s not just Amnesty, it’s all human rights organizations. They remain absolutely defiant about granting that kind of access for on-the-ground, independent, fact-finding.
Q: Over the last decade, has the human rights situation in China become better or worse?
Neve We don’t think there’s an answer to that question. You could point to some areas of improvement but there’s so many other things that have deteriorated in that time.”
In the last decade, there has been “the whole relentless campaign against Falun Gong. It’s within that 10-year-period we saw the unbelievably harsh crackdowns last year in Tibet and this year against the Uygher people. It’s in that 10-year-timeframe, we’ve seen the Internet suppression really take off. At the same time, it’s within that timeframe that there have been perhaps very modest steps forward in improving how the death penalty is handled in China. There has been a very encouraging growth in a domestic human rights community, of activists and researchers and human rights lawyers. That’s good news and that’s very encouraging. The flip side is, they have also been under siege. They have been targeted for harassment, imprisonment, mistreatment. Some have had to flee the country.”
Q. All the more reason then to insist, as a first step, that China must allow human rights monitors into the country?
Neve: That would be such a step forward if China really opened itself, even with U.N. human rights experts, some of whom have been let in from time to time to do some very limited work. That’s been problematic, too. China has often tried to dictate the terms under which U.N. experts can come in. The human rights experts haven’t been willing to do so because they don’t allow their terms to be dictated. There clearly is not a willingness and an openness to international scrutiny which many other countries in the West, even countries with serious human rights problems, recognize is part and parcel of being part of the international community. There are many countries in the world with grave human rights problems who nonetheless regularly grant access to our research teams.
We face our own critics as well. We have our own challenges as well. But we know and recognize that we need to respond to those challenges and demonstrate real progress.