Malaysia FM: China's 'nine-dash line' claim 'ridiculous'

Foreign Minister Saifuddin says Malaysia's decision to take South China Sea claim to UN is its 'sovereign right'. 
by Ted Regencia
Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said he expects ASEAN to further debate in the coming months the need for a 'Code of Conduct' with China over the South China Sea issue

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Malaysia has hardened its diplomatic position on the disputed South China Sea, questioning China's "nine-dash line" claim over the entire sea lane that has already been previously declared with "no legal basis" by an arbitration tribunal in The Hague.
Malaysian Minister of Foreign Affairs Saifuddin Abdullah said late on Friday that Kuala Lumpur has the "sovereign right to claim whatever that is there that is within our waters".
"For China to claim that the whole of South China Sea belongs to China, I think that is ridiculous," Saifuddin said in response to an Al Jazeera question about Malaysia's decision last week to take its case to the United Nations.
"It is a claim that we have made, and we will defend our claim. But of course, having said that, anyone can challenge and dispute, which is not something unusual."
On December 12, Malaysia formally filed a submission seeking clarity on the limits of its continental shelf beyond the 322 kilometre (200 nautical miles) exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the disputed body of water claimed by several countries in the Southeast Asian region.
The move has angered China, which claims "historic rights" over all of South China Sea.
It has also blamed the United States for raising tensions in the area.
In response, the US Navy's Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral John Aquilino accused China of "bullying" its Southeast Asian neighbours.
Malaysia and China are both signatories to the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which codifies the rights and responsibilities of independent states' use of the oceans.
Under UNCLOS, coastal states like Malaysia are entitled to an EEZ.
Beyond that waters are considered the high seas, common to all nations.
UNCLOS also defines rules in the case of overlapping EEZs.
It was on this basis that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague rejected in 2016 China's claims to almost the entire sea, through which an estimated $3 trillion of trade pass each year.
China, however, rejects the ruling in The Hague, and since then has expanded its presence in the region, building artificial islands with runways and installing an advanced missile system.

ASEAN Code of Conduct
Beijing has insisted on the application of its "nine-dash line" demarcation, which claims that the littoral countries are only entitled to the seas and other resources nine miles from their shore.
Aside from the Philippines and Malaysia, China's claim is also being questioned by Vietnam.
Brunei and Taiwan also claim parts of the South China Sea.
Asked whether Malaysia's latest diplomatic move would strengthen the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) push for a unified "Code of Conduct" in the South China Sea, Foreign Minister Saifuddin replied, "It would be debated for sure."
It was unclear what prompted Malaysia to file a formal submission this month.
In August, Saifuddin had said that he was "very hopeful" that ASEAN and China can reach an agreement within the three-year deadline or earlier, to help ease the tensions, Bloomberg News reported him as saying.
In September, Saifuddin also met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to set up a "bilateral consultation mechanism for maritime issues".
The agreement was dubbed "a new platform for dialogue and cooperation".
China has tried to keep discussions over the sea on a bilateral basis rather than negotiating with ASEAN as a group.
In October, Saifuddin told members of Parliament that Malaysia should be "upgraded" in order to "better manage our waters should there be a conflict between major powers in the South China Sea."
For the last 10 years, China has been Malaysia's largest trading partner.
In 2018, its trade was estimated to be at about $76.6bn, representing 16.7 percent of Malaysia's total trade, according to Malaysia's trade ministry.

Chinese Doublespeak

‘Human rights with Chinese characteristics’ are in fact crimes against humanity
By Omer Kanat

In 2017, three days before Human Rights Day on December 10, Beijing hosted the ‘South-South Human Rights Forum.’

The event took place as the Chinese authorities were interning vast numbers of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in concentration camps. 

More than 300 delegates from 70 countries attended. 

The outcome document, the ‘Beijing Declaration,’ affirmed states should “choose a human rights development path or guarantee model that suits its specific conditions.” 

In sum, China sought an international clearance for the concept of ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ sublimating individual and collective freedoms to the needs of the state.

The world is learning quickly about the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of human rights. 

In East Turkestan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Southern Mongolia, Taiwan, and China’s heartland, the Chinese government has met any opposition with repression and destabilization. 

Indeed, the application of the latest technologies to create a pervasive system of surveillance indicates the party has taken the step of preempting any resistance to its authoritarian rule. 

The recent leaks of government documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times lay bare how the party intends to commit cultural genocide against the Uyghur people through “no mercy” policies.
The label ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ is a misnomer. 

It is how the Chinese Communist Party attempts to entangle the interests of Chinese people with the logics of their continued power. 

If it was at all possible, just ask any one of the imprisoned Chinese human rights lawyers how they feel about “the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and human rights protection.” 

However, the imposition of the party’s vision of human rights does not stop at China’s borders. 

The profitable export of surveillance technology enables states to restrict the fundamental human rights of individuals on every continent.

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uighurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese East Turkestan colony and ask for the closure of “re-education center” where Uighurs are detained, during a demonstration around the EU institutions in Brussels on April 27, 2018. 

Human Rights Day commemorates the day the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a foundational document outlining rights standards and translated into over 500 languages, including Uyghur. 

It’s worth revisiting the 30 articles of the UDHR. 

From Article 5, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” to Article 9, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” to Article 20, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” China is in open violation of these fundamental rights in regards to the Uyghur people.
It is, therefore, no surprise the Chinese government is actively subverting the concept of universal human rights by cooking up its own version. 

Since 2017, evidence of mass arbitrary detention and torture of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples has become indisputable. 

The Chinese government has rationalized these crimes against humanity within the logics of ‘vocational training,’ as if the systemic ethnocide of their people was somehow in the interests of the Uyghurs.

File photo posted by the East Turkestan Judicial Administration to its WeChat account. 

However, the Chinese Communist Party does not limit the spread of its concept of human rights to events such as the South-South Human Rights Forum. 

More alarming, Beijing is leveraging the United Nations itself to undermine the standards set out in the UDHR. 

In recent years, China has been able to mute criticism, as well as find champions for its rights abuses among UN member states. 

This has been partly achieved through an exchange of loans and grants for silence and support, as well as threats and intimidation.
Furthermore, China has targeted individual human rights defenders. 

In 2017, China tried to prevent me from delivering my statement at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, and at the 2019 Forum, it attempted to do the same to the President of the World Uyghur Congress Dolkun Isa. 

In 2013, China detained Cao Shunli, who was on her way to attend China’s Universal Periodic Review in 2013. 

She was charged with illegal assembly, picking quarrels and provoking trouble and died in detention in 2014. 

Remember, this is a state the UN Secretary-General has called “a pillar of international cooperation and multilateralism.”
Among the enablers of Xi Jinping’s repression are states with disreputable records attracted to a possible exemption from universal standards that ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ affords. 

And again, if we could freely ask the populations who reside in these states how they feel about such a concept, there would be few advocates. 

Therefore, on Human Rights Day, we have a responsibility to defend those who defend universal values and be clear ‘never again’ has meaning. 

There is injustice everywhere and we must fight it. 

Uyghurs are among them, for example, the imprisoned Ilham Tohti, and in exile Rebiya Kadeer, Rushan Abbas, and Gulchehra Hoja, whose families have been detained and disappeared in East Turkestan because of their advocacy. 

The second ‘South-South Human Rights Forum’ is opening in Shanghai for this year’s Human Rights Day. 

The dangerous fiction of the ‘Beijing Declaration’ that there are exceptions to the universality of rights should be firmly resisted.

President Trump at United Nations offers his most forceful support for Hong Kong yet

Trump failed to back Hong Kong for months. He finally did at the UN
By Alex Ward
President Donald Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2019, in New York City. 

 
President Donald Trump just made his most forceful comments yet in defense of Hong Kong, telling China that it must respect the city’s democracy and abide by the decades-old agreement giving it semi-autonomy.
President Trump made the remarks during his address at the United Nations on Tuesday. 

Most of the speech was spent rehashing many of his talking points about the virtues of nationalism and the importance of national sovereignty. 

But the Hong Kong section was a particular surprise since he has for months failed to offer a full-throated defense of the city’s pro-democracy protesters.
Now he has — challenging Beijing in the process.
“The world fully expects that the Chinese government will honor its binding treaty made with the British and registered with the United Nations in which China commits to protect Hong Kong’s freedom, legal system, and democratic ways of life,” Trump told the room full of foreign dignitaries gathered at the UN headquarters in New York. 

“How China chooses to handle this situation will say a great deal about its role in the world in the future. We are all counting on Xi as a great leader.”


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Trump on Hong Kong: "How China chooses to handle this situation will say a great deal about its role in the world in the future. We are all counting on Xi as a great leader." https://cbsn.ws/2mAI8Rd #UNGA

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4:36 PM - Sep 24, 2019

The comments came during President Trump’s long section on China, in which he accused the country of stealing America’s jobs and intellectual property and of stingily refusing to sign a long-sought trade deal with the US. 

It’s therefore no surprise President Trump lumped in Hong Kong to further humiliate Beijing.

But while President Trump has in the past said he hopes China deals with the demonstrations in the city “humanely,” he had yet to support the city’s democratic rights.

Which means his new comments could open up a further fissure between America and China — and make President Trump a democratic hero in Hong Kong.

China wants to take Hong Kong’s democracy away
After taking over Hong Kong in a war in the 1800s, Britain returned it to China in 1997 with an important stipulation: The city would partly govern itself for 50 years before fully falling under Beijing’s control. 

So until 2047, the expectation was that the city and the mainland would operate under the principle known as “one country, two systems.”
But Beijing clearly isn’t waiting that long. 

“In recent years, the Hong Kong government has disqualified elected lawmakers, banned activists from running for office, prohibited a political party, jailed pro-democracy leaders, expelled a senior foreign journalist, and looked the other way when Beijing kidnapped its adversaries in Hong Kong,” Ben Bland, a Hong Kong expert at the Lowy Institute in Australia, told me in June.
The current fight began over proposed amendments to an extradition law that would allow a person arrested in Hong Kong to face trial elsewhere, including in mainland China. 

Demonstrators took to the streets over the summer because they believed the proposals would all but cement Beijing’s authority in a city that’s supposed to operate mostly on its own.
The popular resistance led Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed government to withdraw the amendments for now. 

But there’s still concern China may try to exert more influence over the city down the line — perhaps with a military intervention.
That’s why President Trump’s comments are such a big deal and will surely resonate among Hong Kong’s protesters: The US president essentially just told China to back off. 

The question now will be whether Beijing chooses to heed Trump’s warning.

China's Final Solution

U.N. Rights Officials Criticize China Over Muslim Internments

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

Uighur Muslims demonstrated in Brussels in September against China’s mass detention of Uighurs in the western colony of East Turkestan.

GENEVA — United Nations human rights officials have sharply condemned regulations issued by China that seek to provide a legal basis for the mass internment of Muslims in the East Turkestan colony.
Six United Nations officials and rights experts said in a letter sent on Monday to the Chinese government that the regulations were a violation of international law, and they urged that those responsible be held accountable.
The regulations were issued by the authorities in East Turkestan in western China, who said they were intended “to contain and eradicate” extremism.
The United Nations experts contended that the new rules to justify mass internments in “re-education centers’’ were based on overly broad definitions of extremist behavior and amounted to criminalizing the legitimate exercise of basic rights.
The experts said the regulations were “incompatible with China’s obligations under international human rights law.”
Western reporting and academic research in recent months have exposed a crackdown on East Turkestan’s Uighur population and other minorities in which as many as one million people, about one-tenth of the region’s population, have disappeared into concentration camps. 

In addition, nearly all aspects of daily life and religious practice have become minutely regulated.
Among those who participated in preparing the letter were Elina Steinerte and Bernard Duhaime, who are members of United Nations panels monitoring enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions; David Kaye, the special rapporteur on freedom of expression; and Fernand Varennes, an expert on minority rights.
An example of what they viewed as overreach by the Chinese officials was references in the regulations that identified extremism as the “spreading of religious fanaticism through irregular beards” or the selection of names.
The regulations stated the authorities’ intention to make religion “more Chinese and under law and actively guide religions to become compatible with socialist society.’’

“We would like to highlight that the homogenization of society and the aim to make religion ‘more Chinese’ are not considered legitimate aims under international law,” the experts said. 

They also argued that the coercive nature of the re-education centers meant they amounted to detention camps.
The statement appeared likely to hit a raw nerve in Beijing with its forceful critique of a policy closely associated with Xi Jinping’s drive to stabilize East Turkestan, a region that has increasing strategic significance in China’s ambitious Belt and Road initiative to connect the country with Central Asia and Europe.
In August, Chinese officials denied to a United Nations panel that it was engaged in mass internments. 

Since then, China has begun a campaign through the state media defending its policies as a "humane" initiative, saying that it was providing "vocational" training for East Turkestan’s ethnic minorities, protecting vulnerable populations from the scourge of extremism and generating employment opportunities.
The human rights experts said they were concerned that the East Turkestan regulations and other measures to suppress dissent applied across China not only violated basic rights, but by “creating pockets of fear, resentment and alienation” could lead to more radicalization and extremism.
The other rights experts who participated in drafting the letter were Ahmed Shaheed, who monitors freedom of religion and belief, and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, who follows the protection of human rights in the context of counterterrorism measures.
Their critique came only a week after China defended its record at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, claiming “tangible and enormous progress” in promoting and protecting “human rights with Chinese characteristics” and dismissing criticism as politically motivated.

France Should Spotlight China's Rights Crisis

Foreign Minister Le Drian Should Call for Releases, Announce Policy Review
Human Rights Watch

French President Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping attend a bilateral meeting in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017. 

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian should publicly urge respect for human rights in meetings with China’s new leadership, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the foreign minister. 

Le Drian is visiting China for the first time as foreign minister from November 24 to 27, 2017.
“French President Emmanuel Macron has explicitly committed to promoting human rights in China along with diplomatic and economic concerns,” said Bénédicte Jeannerod, France director. “Minister Le Drian’s visit is an important opportunity to publicly challenge the Chinese leadership over its rampant human rights violations.”
Human Rights Watch urged Le Drian to:

• Publicly call for the releases of political prisoners Liu Xia, Gao Zhisheng, Jiang Tianyong, and Wang Quanzhang;
• Express concerns about China’s increasing efforts to undermine international institutions that should help defend human rights, including the United Nations, Interpol, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and
• Announce a review of all bilateral law enforcement cooperation.

“France has long been a defender of fundamental rights and liberties worldwide,” Jeannerod said. 

“In the face of an unreceptive Chinese leadership, Minister Le Drian’s visit will be a test of France’s commitment.”

U.S. Bribery Case Sheds Light on Mysterious Chinese Company

By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

President Milos Zeman of the Czech Republic, right, and Ye Jianming, left, in Shanghai in September 2015 for the signing of agreements between companies from his country and the Chinese conglomerate CEFC.

Patrick Ho flew to New York in fall 2014. 

His intention, according to the Justice Department, was to bribe African officials on behalf of a private Chinese conglomerate with global ambitions and enormous wealth.
In meetings at the United Nations, Ho, a former Hong Kong civil servant, laid the groundwork for millions of dollars of payments to the President Idriss Déby of Chad and Uganda’s foreign minister in exchange for oil rights in the two countries, federal prosecutors say.
The accusations against Ho, detailed in a criminal complaint filed in Manhattan, became public this week after officials charged him and Cheikh Gadio, a former Senegalese official who acted as a fixer for Ho, with international money laundering and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Gadio was arrested on Friday and Ho on Saturday, the Justice Department said.
The complaint does not name the Chinese company Ho represented, but the specifics of the case make clear the company’s identity: CEFC China Energy Company.
Details outlined by the Justice Department reveal the innovative tactics the company pursued to secure coveted oil rights in Chad and Uganda through its nonprofit think tank in Hong Kong. 

Mr. Ho was an executive at the nonprofit.
CEFC has risen suddenly from a little known Chinese company to a major player in the global energy business, with investments in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. 

In September, the Chinese conglomerate took a $9 billion stake in Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned energy giant and a subject of sanctions by the United States.
CEFC has played to China’s geopolitical ambitions. 

It is among a small number Chinese companies to receive Beijing’s approval to chase splashy deals at a time when the government has mostly restricted overseas acquisitions. 

The investments have largely meshed with China’s strategy to court other countries through infrastructure and energy investment.
Chinese businesses like CEFC are increasingly mixing money with diplomacy as they scour the world to secure valuable natural resources. 

The criminal complaint against Ho shows how the practice can be distorted, offering rare insight into a vast, mysterious conglomerate with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
CEFC provides all of the financing for the China Energy Fund Committee, a Hong Kong research organization. 

The conglomerate’s founder, Ye Jianming, is listed as a chairman on the think tank’s website.
Through Ho, the think tank brokered the approaches to officials in Chad and Uganda, prosecutors say. Details included in the complaint about the company and think tank were confirmed by news releases from the CEFC’s website.
In a statement, CEFC disputed the allegations. 

It said it was “highly concerned” about the action taken against Ho, a former home affairs secretary in Hong Kong, and added that the think tank did not “get involved in business activities of CEFC.”
CEFC has emerged from obscurity in recent years as a major player in the China’s plans for a modern day Silk Road, scooping up businesses in the oil, travel and financial industries in the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Spain and the Middle East. 

Along the way, it has grown into a behemoth with revenue of nearly $40 billion in 2015, according to corporate disclosures.
Ye, who was 25 when he started the company, has been both a corporate leader and a diplomatic envoy of sorts, posing for photographs with leaders like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, and President Idriss Déby of Chad. 

He has also met with Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman.
His think tank holds special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. 

According to its website, it has organized conferences “on world civilizations to explore common ethics” that have featured senior American military officials and Chinese People’s Liberation Army generals.

Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, a former Senegalese official was charged by the Justice Department in bribery scheme along with Patrick Ho, a former Hong Kong civil servant with ties to CEFC.

In China, CEFC has become a prominent corporate player. 

Its oil storage facilities in Hainan Province are leased to the state-owned giant ChemChina as part of the country’s strategic reserves. 

The company also has joint ventures with the state-backed China State Shipbuilding, China Railway and Guangdong Material Reserve Administration. 

The Communist Youth League, which has long bred new generations of party leaders, is listed as a part of the CEFC management that oversees strategy.
CEFC has sought major oil deals outside China, playing a major role in Xi Jinping’s One Belt One Road initiative to bring developing countries on China’s periphery closer to its orbit through infrastructure projects.
In September, CEFC agreed to take the stake in Rosneft. 

In October, Chan Chauto, the company’s president, met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at an investment forum in Moscow.
CEFC also has a joint venture with Kazakhstan’s national oil company, KazMunayGas International, which has given it access to a network of oil and gas terminals in Europe.
It was the company’s pursuit of oil rights in Africa that attracted the Justice Department’s attention.
Ho met Gadio, a former foreign minister in Senegal, at the United Nations with a proposition, according to the complaint filed in Manhattan. 

CEFC wanted to expand its oil operations into Chad, and to do so with CNPC, a state-owned Chinese company facing a $1.2 billion fine in Chad for environmental violations.
Gadio, who helped broker a peace agreement that ended the military conflict between Chad and Sudan, helped facilitate a CEFC pledge in early 2015 that it would make a $2 million “donation” to Idriss Déby for charitable causes, according to emails and documents obtained by the Justice Department.
The pledge was intended to influence the government to give CEFC the exclusive rights to certain oil blocks, federal prosecutors say. 

In the end, the company acquired other oil rights from a Taiwanese company. 

But Chad’s fine against CNPC was ultimately lowered to $400 million, and CEFC is in talks to develop an oil project in the country with CNPC, according to the CEFC website. 

Ho is accused of paying Gadio $400,000 for his services.
In a statement, CEFC said its deal with the Taiwanese company was a “financial investment in Chad” that did not involve any other “interest” from the country’s government.
Edward Y. Kim, Ho’s lawyer, declined to comment. 

Robert Baum, a lawyer for Gadio, said that his client’s “integrity and honesty have never been questioned.”

Around the time that Ho met with Gadio, he also initiated contact with Uganda’s foreign minister, Sam Kutesa, according to the complaint. 

Kutesa had just become president of the United Nations General Assembly, according to the Justice Department. 

Over the course of a year, the two struck up a friendship, the complaint says.
By 2015, Kutesa, in his General Assembly role, had appointed Ye as a “special honorary adviser,” officials said.
When Kutesa returned to his position as Uganda’s foreign minister, he solicited a payment from Ho in the form of a donation for a charitable foundation that he planned to launch, according to the Justice Department. 

Uganda’s foreign minister Sam Kutesa

The payment was actually in exchange for oil contracts.

Ho wired $500,000 into a bank account designated by Kutesa, who is not charged in the criminal complaint.
The Ugandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment. 

CEFC said it had no investment in Uganda.
Two weeks after the complaint says the money was wired, Kutesa’s wife sent a note to Ho, expressing the couple’s thanks to Ye of CEFC.
“Let me seize this opportunity,” she wrote, “to convey our gratitude to the chairman for his contribution to our foundation.”

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.”

China accused over 'enforced disappearance' of Liu Xiaobo's widow

Liu Xia not seen since sea burial of late Nobel peace prize winner in July

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Liu Xia (centre, holding a portrait of Liu Xiaobo) has not been seen since Beijing released photos of her at her husband’s funeral. 

Chinese authorities are guilty of the Kafkaesque enforced disappearance of Liu Xia, the wife of late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, the couple’s US lawyer has claimed.
Jared Genser, a Washington-based human rights attorney who has represented them since 2010, made the claim in a formal complaint submitted to the United Nations on Wednesday.

A plainclothes agent outside the Beijing apartment of Liu Xia, the wife of the late dissident Liu Xiaobo. 

Almost three weeks after the Chinese dissident became the first Nobel peace prize winner to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky – who died in 1938 after years in Nazi concentration camps – his widow’s precise whereabouts are a mystery.
Friends say the 56-year-old poet was initially forced to travel to southwest China with security agents, but may now have returned to the capital, where she has lived under virtual house arrest since her husband won the Nobel peace prize in December 2010.
Foreign journalists who have attempted to visit the couple’s Beijing flat have faced harassment and physical violence while Chinese officials have refused to answer questions on the subject.
Genser said Beijing’s continued persecution of his client took Communist party repression to an “incredibly disturbing new low” and constituted an enforced disappearance.
In his petition to the UN’s working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances, requesting “urgent intervention”, he wrote: “According to international law, an enforced disappearance involves (1) deprivation of liberty against the will of the person; (2) involvement of government officials; and (3) refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.”
Genser told the Guardian: “It is crystal clear to me that what has happened to Liu Xia falls squarely and unequivocally within this definition.”
Liu Xia was last seen on 15 July when authorities released photographs showing her attending her husband’s controversial sea burial, which supporters suspect was devised to deny them a place to remember the democracy icon and his ideas.
“There has been no information as to where she is, who is detaining her or when she might reappear. [But] it is clear to me … that the Chinese government has her,” said Genser. 

“She continues to suffer enormously … I actually don’t think Kafka could have imagined a scenario as terrible as hers.”
Genser said he expected that, having received his complaint, the UN body would now ask Beijing to respond to claims that Chinese security forces were behind Liu Xia’s disappearance. 

He hoped the move would force Beijing to “reappear” Liu Xia, who has never been charged with any crime, and allow her to leave China. 

The United States, Germany and Britain are among the governments that have called for her release.
Genser also voiced support for a congressional push to rename the street on which China’s US embassy is located, in homage to the late democracy icon. 

According to the Washington Post, Chinese leaders are livid at the campaign and have been lobbying the Trump administration to veto the proposal. 

China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, recently warned the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, that changing the street’s name from International Place to Liu Xiaobo Plaza would “seriously affect Chinese cooperation on major issues”.

Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo

Genser called for similar moves in European capitals that might see Rue de Washington in Paris become the Rue de Liu Xiaobo and London’s Portland Place renamed Liu Xiaobo Place. 

“It is clear that the Chinese government would like to erase the memory of Liu Xiaobo from the world’s imagination. The idea … that every piece of mail that would go to a Chinese embassy in Washington, London and Paris would be [stamped with his name] would really be anathema to the Chinese government.”
Genser said that while his focus was freeing Liu Xia, the campaign was an effective way to pressure Beijing. 

“To me this is a means to an end. I’m not committed to having the street renamed.
“But if the government won’t relent … they are leaving advocates with really no option other than to go down this road.”
China’s foreign ministry, the only government body that regularly interacts with journalists, has repeatedly ignored questions about Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo, who was serving an 11-year jail term for subversion when he was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer in May.
Questions about their plight have been purged from official transcripts of its press conferences. 

“I do not know the information you mentioned and is not a diplomatic question,” foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a reporter from Sky News who inquired about Liu Xia’s whereabouts last week. 

“Next question.”

UN Catches Up With Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, Will China Come To Rescue?

By Panos Mourdoukoutas

The United Nations is catching up with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s human rights record, asking the country’s judicial authorities to launch an investigation.
That’s bad news for Duterte and for financial markets, which have been crushed following his flip-flops on South China Sea disputes.
iShares Philippines is down 20.74 percent since last July; iShares for Vietnam, which which has also been involved in the dispute, have lost close to 15 percent of their value.
Obviously, investors are concerned about the rising economic and political risks of the country, and the prospects for the on-going economic integration of the region into the global economy — most notably China, which needs a market frontier for its manufacturing products.
Actually, the international institutions have been very fair with Philippines. 

For example, last July the nation won an international arbitration ruling, which found that China has no historic title over the waters of the South China Sea.
That was a big victory for both the US and Philippines, its close ally, which had filed the arbitration case.
But Rodrigo Duterte didn’t capitalize on the ruling by having China compensate his country for the damage already done. 

Instead, he decided to side with China on the dispute, and seek a “divorce” from the US!
Apparently, Duterte thought that his country is better off appeasing rather than confronting China.
Now, the UN has caught up with his human rights record. 

And he’s going to need China, an influential UN member, to come to his rescue.
Will Beijing do it?
It’s hard to say. 

So far there’s no official response from Beijing on the issue. 

In the meantime, investors in Philippines equities must keep a wary eye on Mr. Duterte’s next flip-flop. 

It may bring more losses.