Reuters: UN human rights chief to visit China

Sunday, February 25, 2001

BEIJING: UN human rights chief Mary Robinson was due in China on Sunday for talks as activists urged her to press Beijing to scrap a "re-education through labour" system used to incarcerate dissidents and Falun Gong followers.

The visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for a seminar on minor crimes comes as Beijing is girding for its annual fight to avoid formal censure at the annual UN rights meeting in Geneva.

The two-day workshop, the first fruit of a landmark technical cooperation pact Robinson signed with China in November, follows a stream of reports alleging widespread rights violations, including torture and Soviet-style political abuse of psychiatry.

China, which scrambled in the past week to fend off human rights critics as visiting International Olympics Committee (IOC) inspectors evaluated Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Games, dismissed the reports as "groundless" and "irresponsible".

But the Olympics inspection tour was marred by the detention of several dissidents and the sentencing to two years re-education through labour of a woman who wrote to the IOC asking it to press Beijing to free political prisoners.

Covenant review, re-education debate

Beijing has signaled it might serve up some news to soften criticism, with the standing committee of China's parliament scheduled to hold its third reading of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

China has said for months it would ratify the pact it signed in 1997, and diplomats said the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee session on February 26-28 would be the most likely time for Beijing to follow through on that pledge.

During her last Beijing visit, Robinson urged China to ratify both the economic pact and the far more demanding Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. She told a news conference China had a "very significant way to go" in meeting international standards of freedom of expression, association and religious belief.

Robinson's Workshop on Punishment of Minor Crimes on Monday and Tuesday was expected to focus on re-education through labour sentences, which Beijing metes out without trial to prostitutes, drug users and opponents or critics of the [party's name omitted] Party.

Beijing has used labour sentences to detain at least 5,000 adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which angered authorities with a big protest in April 1999. The group was later banned as an "[Chinese government's slanderous word]", Falun Gong spokespeople have said.

Amid debate in Chinese legal circles and as the government plans to revise slightly the labour camp punishment, the New York-based group Human Rights in China urged Robinson to press Beijing to scrap the 45-year-old system.

"We do not believe that this is a system that can be 'fixed' or 'reformed' by adding a formalistic judicial review," the group said in a statement which cited Chinese data showing that 260,000 people were held in re-education-through-labour camps.

Showdown in Geneva

Three weeks after Robinson's Beijing workshop, the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva will open its annual meeting, which for the past decade has been an arena of conflict between China and mostly Western critics of its rights record.

The George W. Bush administration, in its first major decision on China, has said it would sponsor a UN resolution faulting Beijing's human rights record next month in Geneva.

The U.S. State Department's annual human rights report, due out in several days, is expected to underscore criticism about the crackdown on Falun Gong, tough policies in the Buddhist region of Tibet and curbs on the media and the Internet.

China over the past decade has almost always escaped even debate on the issues and Beijing this month urged those thinking of pushing a resolution to "draw lessons from past failures".