AFP: Human Rights Watch Slams China's "Whitewash" of Poor Rights Record (excerpt)

BEIJING, Apr 10, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Human Rights Watch Tuesday slammed China's white paper on human rights as a whitewash clearly aimed at the ongoing session of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

Sidney Jones, Asia director of the New York-based group, said the white paper was part of a two-pronged lobbying strategy to prompt the UN to take a soft line on China's human rights record.

"We've seen this combination before: high-level visits to Latin American 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," he said.

The current session of the UN Human Rights Commission opened on March 19 and China's rights record is expected to be discussed later this month.

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Controls on freedom of association, assembly, and expression, already tight, are tightening further but the report highlights Chinese people's political rights while failing to touch on the recent arrests of Chinese scholars resident abroad and members of the Falun Gong spiritual [group].

The report talks about China's efforts to ensure an impartial judiciary, when the politicization and [party name omitted] Party control of the courts is a constant of the Chinese legal system, Human Rights Watch said.

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Efforts to establish schools for Uighur children led to the arrest of a prominent Uighur businesswoman, and Tibetan cultural institutions are under constant surveillance from state authorities but the Chinese report stresses government protection of minorities, it said.

The first Chinese White Paper on Human Rights was published in November 1991, while the memories of the military's cruising of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement were still fresh.

There is also a precedent for high-level visits to Latin America just before the UN Human Rights Commission's meeting. Of the six countries on President Jiang Zemin's current itinerary, only Chile is not a member of the current Commission.

Some of these countries might be inclined to join with the United States, if not in sponsoring a resolution, then in trying to defeat China's efforts to ensure it will not come to a vote, Human Rights Watch said.