Hindu (India): Chinese "White Paper on Rights a Cover-up'

NEW YORK, APRIL 15. Human Rights Watch has said that China's new "white paper'' on human rights is clearly aimed at the ongoing session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva - part of the same lobbying strategy that brought the Chinese President, Mr. Jiang Zemin, to Latin America.

``This so-called white paper is a whitewash of China's human rights practices'', said Mr. Sidney Jones, Asia Director of Human Rights Watch. ``But we've seen this combination before: high- level visits to Latin America to get allies for the Commission, together with the release of a report which boasts that China's human rights record has never been better.''

The current session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission opened on March 19 and China's rights record is expected to be discussed later this month. The new white paper, issued by Beijing recently, highlights: improvements in the general standard of living and in `people's rights to subsistence and development' at a time when the collapse of rural education and healthcare programs has been of growing concern; the guarantee of citizens' political rights, at a time when controls on freedom of association, assembly, and expression, already tight, are being tightened further. The recent arrests of Chinese scholars residing abroad and Falun Gong members are a case in point; China's efforts to ensure an impartial judiciary, when the politicization and party control of the courts is a constant of the Chinese legal system; protection of women and children's rights; after a much publicized explosion in a school in Jiangxi province where children were illegally making firecrackers caused the deaths of 41 people; equal rights and special protection for ethnic minorities at a time when efforts to establish schools of Uighur children led to the arrest of a prominent Uighur businesswoman, and when Tibetan cultural institutions are under constant surveillance from state authorities; China's `positive attitude toward carrying out international cooperation in human rights' at a time when it systematically flouts some of the most important provisions of the human rights treaties it has ratified (for example, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights) and signed (the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights).