Montreal Gazette: Human rights in China

Thursday February 8, 2001 Team Canada, with Prime Minister Jean Chretien at the helm, leaves for China tomorrow on a 10-day trip, anxious to make the most of the opportunities inherent in a $1-trillion economy. Canada is hardly alone in its desire to do business with the world's most populous country, but China's business comes at a steep moral price. Western human-rights organizations such as Amnesty International estimate that last year in China there were as many as 100,000 protests against human-rights abuses, including demonstrations and riots in the countryside. [...] Falun Gong, the exercise and meditation practice that China outlawed in 1999, is only the most visible religious group to face a crackdown by the Chinese government. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International report that other religious groups, including Christians and Buddhists, are also facing brutal persecution. [...] Canadian citizens have not been spared. Montrealer Jin Yu Li wants Mr. Chretien to press Chinese President Jiang Zemin for the release of her husband, his brother and sister and her brother - all practitioners of Falun Gong - from a Chinese labour camp. Ms. Li's legal counsel, Liberal MP and McGill University law professor Irwin Cotler, rightly points out the numerous incentives China has to improve its human-rights record this year. They include trade missions such as Canada's, the annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission which begins March 19, China's bid for membership in the World Trade Organization and its desire to host the 2008 Olympic Games. The danger in Mr. Chretien's not bringing up the issue of human rights is that the Canadian government appears to condone abuses even against our own citizens. The temptation is always to assume that human rights may be strengthened through increased trade or measures that promise improvements without spelling out exactly how or what. Desperate to win their Olympic bid, the Chinese government has offered to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which would force it to accept visits from officials assigned to uphold international standards. The catch? China refuses to ratify the covenant unless the right to form trade unions is excluded. In a more promising move, China has also suggested it might agree to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit its prisons. If anything, Canada has the upper hand this time around. China wants the approval of the outside world. Even while its strongest impulse is still to behave like a dictatorship, the Chinese government is going to have to bend. The least Canada can do is stand up for the rights of its citizens unfairly arrested and imprisoned for daring to belong to a group a foreign government disapproves of.