Last February 19th we carried the bleak assessment of the global state of human rights contained in the Human Rights Watch World Report for 2007. How do things look six months later?
Amnesty International has just produced its own report on the state of human rights in China, a particularly sensitive issue in the run up to next year's Beijing Olympics. Of course it is true that the modern games with their emphasis on the purely physical side of human development sometimes seem to celebrate aims closer to those of stockbreeding than to the classical ideals of the healthy mind in the healthy body. Still, it is relevant to ask how the host country values the human individual. Amnesty finds -
- continued use of death sentences and executions for nonviolent crimes and ongoing failure to disclose national death penalty statistics
- Increased use of detention without trial to "clean up" Beijing ahead of the games, including "enforced drug rehabilitation" and the extension of categories of petty crime for which "re-education through labor" is applied
- Intensification of abuse against human rights activists in other parts of China, including the death of award-winning housing rights activist Chen Xiaoming in Shanghai on July 1st, shortly after his release from prison on medical parole with reports indicating that he was tortured in detention
There is much else. And since Amnesty's findings were published it has been reported that the wife of imprisoned blind campaigner against forced abortion Chen Guangcheng has been prevented from travelling to the Philippines to collect the 2007 Magsaysay Award - "Asia's Nobel Prize".
Meanwhile at the end of the recent meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, grouping together China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the joint declaration, though strong on the rights of states to pursue their national interests within a UN framework, contained not a word on human rights. Indeed there was a veiled threat to freedom of communication through the internet where it was used for "purposes incompatible with the objectives of ensuring international stability and security", i.e when it doesn't suit us.
In Britain - one of the the first countries to sign the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights - David Cameron has reverted to a type he had been previously careful to avoid by calling for the repeal of the 1998 Human Rights Act and its replacement by a specifically British version - a route the Chinese and every other human rights abusing country would very much like to follow. The general thesis of the Human Rights Watch report was that with the flagrant abuses committed by the Coalition in Iraq, the ongoing affront to legality and decency that is Guantanamo and the wider European complicity with "extraordinary rendition" and torture, there was now no powerful state capable of leading the demand for the observance of human rights. Cameron's attempt to pick and choose which rights he thinks Britain should accept adds to the downward spiral of credibility of the system as a whole. Click here for more details on Amnesty's report on human rights in China
It is now up to those who understand that human rights are universal principles to impose them again on governments and politicians who seem to have lost their way.
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