Mankind's Enemy No. 1

China is a global threat to human rights, report finds
By Amy Woodyatt

The Chinese government increasingly poses a "global threat to human rights," according to NGO Human Rights Watch.
In its annual report reviewing human rights standards in nearly 100 countries, the NGO warned that China is carrying out an intensive attack on the global system for enforcing human rights.
The report's release comes after HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said he was denied entry to Hong Kong -- with no reason given by immigration authorities.
Roth had planned to launch the report in the city, which has been rocked by anti-government protests for over seven months.
HRW echoed longstanding concerns about China's use of an "Orwellian high-tech surveillance state" and sophisticated internet censorship system to catch and stamp out public criticism.
The report also pointed to the detainment and intense surveillance of hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims in the far western colony of East Turkestan.
Beijing has faced increasing international pressure over its tactics in East Turkestan, with multiple, unprecedented leaks shining a light on a massive network of concentration camps targeting Muslims. Former detainees have also spoken out, with a former teacher in the camps telling CNN they witnessed abuse and attempts at brainwashing of detainees.
Beijing has previously denied accusations of ethnic or religious discrimination in East Turkestan, which is home to 10 million Muslims.

Beyond East Turkestan, HRW warned of "mass intrusions" on personal privacy including the forced collection of DNA and use of artificial intelligence and big data analysis "to refine its means of control."
High-tech surveillance and censorship tactics pioneered in East Turkestan have previously been rolled out to other parts of the country, and there have been concerns that other religious minorities -- including Hui Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists -- are facing similar restrictions to those placed on Islam in East Turkestan.
"Beijing has long suppressed domestic critics," Roth said in a news release after he was prevented from entering Hong Kong.
"Now the Chinese government is trying to extend that censorship to the rest of the world. To protect everyone's future, governments need to act together to resist Beijing's assault on the international human rights system."

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'Lukewarm and selective support'
As well as criticizing China for undermining international human rights protections, HRW also took aim at democratic governments and world leaders for their "lukewarm and selective support" for existing standards.
The organization criticized Donald Trump, who was deemed to be "more interested in embracing friendly autocrats than defending the human rights standards that they flout."
It also singled out the European Union for a failure to adopt a "strong common voice" on human rights, both in China and around the world, and noted that it was instead distracted by Brexit, nationalism and migration.
In the report, the NGO calls for governments and financial institutions to offer alternatives to Chinese loans and development aid, and for universities and companies to promote codes and common standards for dealing with China.
Beijing has emerged as the primary donor for much of the developing world, as well as extending major trade and infrastructure investment through Xi Jinping's Belt and Road project.
The report also urges leaders to force a discussion about East Turkestan -- where massive concentration camps are located -- at the UN Security Council.
Such international condemnation has been hard to come by, however, particularly among Muslim countries, which might be expected to speak out against China's hardline tactics.
At the UN General Assembly in late October, 23 mostly Western countries came forward to make a strong, official statement criticizing Beijing's East Turkestan concentration camps.
In response, Belarus issued a statement claiming 54 countries were in support of the East Turkestan camps system. 
Not all signatories were revealed, but a similar statement in July included several Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran.
"An inhospitable terrain for human rights is aiding the Chinese government's attack," the organization said in a statement.
"A growing number of governments that previously could be relied on at least some of the time to promote human rights in their foreign policy now have leaders, such as Donald Trump, who are unwilling to do so."

Hong Kong Blocks US Human Rights Group’s Director at Airport

By Annie Wu

Pro-democracy protesters attend a rally at Edinburgh Place in the Central district of Hong Kong on Jan. 12, 2020.

The executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) was denied entry into Hong Kong on Jan. 12, just days before a planned press conference there to release the organization’s annual human rights report.
Kenneth Roth first sent out a video via Twitter at around 8 p.m. local time, saying that he had landed at Hong Kong International Airport in preparation for the Jan. 15 event.
But immigration authorities blocked him from entering the territory, “illustrating the worsening problem” of the Chinese regime’s overreach, he said.
China seeks to “not simply suppress the rights of people at home, but also undermine the ability of anybody else to try to hold China to human rights standards,” Roth said in the video.
In deciding to release the report in Hong Kong, he had hoped to spotlight Beijing’s assault on human rights around the world, which will be a key subject of the annual report, Roth said.
He posted on Twitter a photo of the report cover, which appears to depict a recent Hong Kong demonstration.
While Roth has been able to travel to Hong Kong in the past, this time, “the Chinese government decided it didn’t want to let me in,” he said.
When he asked authorities why he was being denied entry, he said they repeatedly told him for “immigration reasons,” without further explanation.
“This disappointing action is yet another sign that Beijing is tightening its oppressive grip on Hong Kong and further restricting the limited freedom Hong Kong people enjoy under ‘one country, two systems,’” Roth said in a subsequent statement released by HRW, referring to the framework by which the Chinese regime promised to rule Hong Kong upon the territory’s handover of sovereignty to China from the UK in 1997.
“Concerned governments should take a firm stand against China’s creeping repression that massive numbers of people have protested against for months,” he said.
Since June, Hongkongers have held mass protests against Beijing’s encroachment, accusing the Chinese regime of violating its promise to respect Hong Kong’s autonomy.
Initially sparked by opposition to an extradition bill that would allow the Chinese regime to transfer individuals for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts, the protests have since broadened to include demands for universal suffrage in city elections and an independent investigation into police use of force against protesters.
HRW has been vocal in condemning Hong Kong’s pro-China government for failing to listen to protesters’ demands.
“They have limited protests by denying permits, targeted journalists covering the demonstrations, detained first aid providers trying to help the injured, and failed to condemn Chinese soldiers’ brief but unauthorized appearance on the streets of Hong Kong,” read one statement published on Dec. 6.
In another statement, published in August, HRW condemned Hong Kong police for using “excessive force” against protesters, detailing several incidents in which Hong Kong police action violated international standards.
The group drew the ire of Beijing early last month, when in retaliation for U.S. President Donald Trump’s signing of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, the regime announced it would sanction HRW and some other U.S.-based human rights organizations.
Hong Kong has denied entry to several foreign visitors in recent months, drawing concerns that the territory is being pressured by Beijing to silence critics of the ruling communist party.
Earlier this month, an American photographer who has been documenting the city’s protests was denied entry.
In September last year, U.S. academic Dan Garrett, who wrote a book about Hong Kong’s history of resistance against the Chinese regime since 1997, also was denied entry.
On Jan. 12, hundreds of Hongkongers again convened at Edinburgh Place for a rally calling for international sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials for human rights violations.
Protester Sheung Chi said he hoped the United States would “actually enforce” the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act to punish Chinese officials.

China's crimes against humanity

Rights Groups Seek U.N. Inquiry Into China’s Mass Detention of Muslims

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

A Uighur resident of Kasghar, in China’s East Turkestan colony, in 2017. China has swept around a million people, mostly ethnic Uighur Muslims, into indefinite detention.

GENEVA — Human rights groups called on Monday for a United Nations investigation into China’s mass detention of Muslims in the colony of East Turkestan, seeking to galvanize an international response to allegations of widespread abuses.
The rights organizations, presenting the issue as a test of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s credibility, urged it to set up an international fact-finding mission during its session that starts at the end of February.
“The magnitude of abuses occurring in East Turkestan demand uncompromising scrutiny,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement released at a news conference in Geneva.
“The Human Rights Council’s integrity demands that states not allow China to hide behind its membership or economic might to escape accountability,” he said.
Human Rights Watch was joined by Amnesty International, the Geneva-based International Service for Human Rights and the World Uyghur Congress, a Munich-based group representing the Uighur ethnic group, sometimes spelled Uyghur.
Investigations by academics and journalists over the past year have exposed a campaign that has swept around a million people, mostly Uighur Muslims, into indefinite detention in an expanding network of secretive "re-education" camps across East Turkestan.
The Chinese authorities, invoking what they called the threat of "terrorism", have also carried out a draconian crackdown on Muslims that has targeted religious practice and customs. 

Officials have banned beards, religious instruction of children and even the granting of names with religious connotations to children.
“This is an effort to change the religious and ethnic identity of an important minority,” Mr. Roth said, and “absolutely demands an international response.”
Underpinning the campaign has been a surveillance program involving widespread installation of facial recognition technology, collection of DNA samples and deployment of thousands of additional security personnel.
“East Turkestan has become an open-air prison — a place where Orwellian high-tech surveillance, political indoctrination, forced cultural assimilation, arbitrary arrests and disappearances have turned ethnic minorities into strangers in their own land,” Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said in a video statement.
China’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva could not immediately be contacted for comment. Many Chinese government offices have closed in celebration of the Lunar New Year.
China initially responded to reports of mass incarceration of Muslims by issuing blanket denials, but its position changed after a United Nations panel monitoring religious equality expressed its alarm in August.
Defending its record at the Human Rights Council in November, China brushed aside allegations of mass detentions and abuses as politically motivated, presenting its camps as "vocational training" centers designed to improve the economic prospects and living standards of China’s minorities.
China has sought to reinforce the official narrative this year by taking small groups of diplomats and journalists on carefully arranged visits to East Turkestan, but journalists trying to make independent visits have faced obstacles.
The European Union said last week that a visit by three of its diplomats to sites carefully selected by the Chinese authorities had provided insight into China’s official thinking, “but does not invalidate the E.U.’s view of the human rights situation in East Turkestan, including in relation to mass detention, political re-education, religious freedom and sinicization policies.”
With their call for an international investigation on Monday, the human rights groups sought to ratchet up pressure for action not only by the United Nations but also by its member states, including members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which remained conspicuously silent during November’s review of China’s record.
Last year, European states and members of the group of Muslim nations had combined in the Human Rights Council to step up investigation of Myanmar’s atrocities against Rohingya Muslims. 

“In our view, East Turkestan demands a similar response,” Mr. Roth said.
Discreet diplomacy, Mr. Roth said, would have no impact on Chinese leaders who, in his view, have concluded that they can get away with the abuses against Muslims. 

Mr. Roth said only public exposure through an international investigation could change China’s course.

Rogue Nation

China’s Rights Crackdown Is Called ‘Most Severe’ Since Tiananmen Square
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE

Pro-democracy activists held portraits of the detained Chinese human rights lawyers Jiang Tianyong, background left, and Wang Quanzhang at a protest in Hong Kong this summer.

GENEVA — China is systematically undermining international human rights groups in a bid to silence critics of its crackdown on such rights at home, a watchdog organization said on Tuesday. 

The group also faulted the United Nations for failing to prevent the effort, and being complicit in it.
“China’s crackdown on human rights activists is the most severe since the Tiananmen Square democracy movement 25 years ago,” Kenneth Roth, the director of the agency, Human Rights Watch, said in Geneva on Tuesday at the introduction of a report that he described as an international “wake-up call.” 

“What’s less appreciated is the lengths to which China goes to prevent criticism of that record of oppression by people outside China, particularly those at the United Nations.”
“The stakes are not simply human rights for the one-sixth of the world’s population who live in China,” Mr. Roth added, “but also the survival and effectiveness of the U.N. human rights system for everyone around the globe.”
The report highlights China’s measures to prevent activists from leaving the country to attend meetings at the United Nations, its harassment of those who do manage to attend and the risk of reprisals when they return or if they interact with United Nations investigators inside or outside China.
The report also noted barriers placed by Chinese officials to visits by United Nations human rights officials. 
Beijing has not allowed a visit by the agency’s High Commissioner for human rights since 2005, and continues to delay 15 requests for visits by special rapporteurs working on political and civil rights issues.

China allowed visits by four rapporteurs since 2005 on issues like poverty, debt and the status of women. 

But it carefully choreographed those visits, and contacts not sanctioned by the state posed risks to those involved. 

The United Nations has expressed concern that the detention of Jiang Tianyong, a prominent human rights lawyer, resulted from a 2016 meeting in Beijing with the United Nations special rapporteur on poverty, Philip Alston.
Mr. Jiang disappeared for several months and was later charged with subversion.
The report also documents China’s diplomacy in the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where China aligns with an informal collection of states, including Algeria, Cuba, Egypt and Venezuela, that discretely coordinate their positions to deflect scrutiny of their records and consistently challenge the council’s ability to look into accusations of abuse in other states without their consent.
“It’s becoming a mutual defense society among odious dictators in which everybody understands the need to deflect criticism of you today because they may criticize us tomorrow,” Mr. Roth said.
“And China is an active, willing partner in that effort.”
Moreover, China has withheld information requested by United Nations bodies that monitor issues like torture, treatment of the disabled and children’s rights, and has tried to stop the filming and online posting of their proceedings, Human Rights Watch said.
The report also accused China of using its position on a United Nations committee that accredits nongovernment organizations to obstruct applications by civil society groups.
Individual measures by China could be passed over as unremarkable, Mr. Roth said, “but when you put it all together, what it represents is a frontal assault on the U.N. human rights system.”
Human Rights Watch delivered a copy of its report to China but received no substantive response, he said.
The effect of China’s behavior on human rights is like “death by a thousand cuts,” Mr. Roth said, but he also pointed to the dangers of “a thousand acts of acquiescence” by the United Nations and states that support human rights.
Human Rights Watch presented a copy of its report to the United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, Mr. Roth said, but Mr. Guterres’s response did not mention China by name.
“That illustrates what needs to change,” Mr. Roth said.
A request for comment from Mr. Guterres’s office was not immediately returned.
The report cited the United Nations’ treatment of the Uighur rights activist Dolkun Isa, who had received United Nations accreditation to attend meetings in its New York headquarters but was escorted off the premises by security officers without explanation.
It also cited the exceptional treatment that the United Nations accorded Chinese dictator Xi Jinping when he visited its Geneva headquarters in January: It sent home many staff members early, refused access to nongovernment organizations and granted access to only a handful of journalists.
Its handling of the occasion “was an utter embarrassment for the U.N.,” Mr. Roth said.
“It became actively complicit in Xi Jinping’s terror of any criticism. It was an utter abandonment of the principles the U.N. should abide by. It was a shameful moment.”

Rogue Nation: China seeks to silence critics at U.N. forums

"China is systematically trying to undermine the U.N.’s ability to defend human rights, certainly in China but also globally as well." -- Kenneth Roth

By Stephanie Nebehay

Security cameras are attached to a pole in front of the giant portrait of  Chinese dictator Mao Zedong on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, near the Great Hall of the People where the 18th National Party Congress (NPC) is currently being held, November 11, 2012.

GENEVA -- Beijing is waging a campaign of harassment against Chinese activists who seek to testify at the United Nations about repression, while the world body turns a blind eye or is complicit, Human Rights Watch said.
In a report released on Tuesday, the group said China restricts travel of activists, or photographs or films them if they do come to the U.N. in Geneva to cooperate with human rights watchdogs scrutinizing its record.
“What we found is that China is systematically trying to undermine the U.N.’s ability to defend human rights, certainly in China but also globally as well,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.
“This comes at a point where domestically China’s repression is the worst it has been since the Tiananmen Square democracy movement (in 1989). So there is much to hide and China clearly attaches enormous importance to muting criticism of its increasingly abysmal human rights record.”
Asked about the report at a regular briefing on Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang dismissed its accusations as “groundless”.

The U.N. system offers one of the few remaining channels for Chinese activists to express their views, the New York-based group said.

Its report, “The Costs of International Advocacy: China’s Interference in United Nations Human Rights Mechanisms,” is based on 55 interviews.

“NIP-IT-IN-THE-BUD STRATEGY”

Pro-democracy demonstrators hold up portraits of Chinese disbarred lawyer Jiang Tianyong, demanding his release, during a demonstration outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong, China December 23, 2016. 

“Xi Jinping seems to have adopted a ‘nip it in the bud’ strategy with respect to activism at home, but increasingly abroad. That’s one of our messages, China’s repression isn’t stopping at its borders these days,” Roth said.
In China, activists have “decreasing space safe” from intimidation, arbitrary detention, and a legal system controlled by the Communist Party, the report said, decrying a crackdown on activists and lawyers since 2015.

Some activists who have attended U.N. reviews of China’s record have been punished on their return, it said. 

Others have their passports confiscated or are arrested before departure.
When Xi addressed the U.N. in Geneva in January, the U.N. barred non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from attending, Human Rights Watch said.

Dolkun Isa, executive chairman of the World Uyghur Congress, speaks on his phone at the organization’s Munich office July 6, 2015. 

Dolkun Isa, an ethnic Uighur rights activist originally from China, was attending a U.N. event in New York in April when U.N. security guards ejected him without explanation, despite his accreditation, it added.
Jiang Tianyong, a prominent human rights lawyer, disappeared last November, months after meeting in Beijing with U.N. special rapporteur on poverty Philip Alston who has called for his release.
Jiang, after being held incommunicado for six months, was charged with subversion. 

At his trial last month he confessed, saying that he had been inspired to overthrow China’s political system by workshops he had attended overseas.
“It illustrates the lengths to which China will go to ensure that even when it admits a U.N. investigator, the investigator only hears the government’s side of the story,” Roth said.
”When a rare activist is able to break through the ‘cordon sanitaire’, they are arrested.
“So the signal is clear -- don’t you dare present an independent perspective to a U.N. investigator.”