2015-12-10
North Korean refugees Grace Jo (L) and Jung Gwang-il speak at a news conference before a United Nations Security Council meeting on the human rights in the country, in New York, Dec. 10, 2015.
AFP
Activists across Asia marked International Human Rights Day on Thursday by calling for greater freedom in China and other authoritarian and repressive states, joining foreign diplomats in urging the release of political prisoners, bloggers, and others imprisoned for the peaceful expression of dissent.
The day saw a hunger strike by an ethnic Mongolian dissident and his family in China, rallies in the capitals of Cambodia and Myanmar and – by a coincidence of the calendar – a hearing on North Korea’s dire human rights situation in the United Nations Security Council that proceeded despite China’s efforts to block it.
In Beijing, U.S. ambassador Max Baucus marked the day with a call on China to ease up on its long campaign of suppressing lawyers, human rights defenders and other activists.
Nearly six months after President Xi Jinping launched a sweeping crackdown that has seen hundreds of lawyers harassed, detained or disappeared, Baucus urged his hosts to treat lawyers as “partners, not enemies of the government.”
The United States remains “concerned over the crackdown on human rights lawyers and others who seek peacefully to contribute their views to the public discourse on the future of China,” Baucus said in a statement posted on Dec. 10 to the website of the U.S. embassy, one of several foreign missions to make appeals on Thursday.
‘Serious problems persist’
Baucus cited the cases of detained human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti as high-profile prisoners of conscience, as did the German embassy, which warned in a strongly worded statement of its own that “serious problems persist with regard to freedom of opinion in China.”
China was also rapped in a U.N. report calling the use of torture by Chinese police to obtain confessions “deeply entrenched” in the country’s justice system. Beijing dismissed the report, and U.S.-based veteran activist Liu Qing said the report is unlikely to lead to real change in China.
“China isn’t going to stop using torture to get forced confessions out of people because the U.N. says it should,” Liu said.
“The [ruling] Chinese Communist Party wants to ensure its dictatorship continues, and it needs to use such methods to terrorize and subjugate its subjects,” he said.
Rights abuses, especially toward China’s minority populations, have also been made worse by China’s “failed environmental policies,” according to a joint statement released on Thursday by Han Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Southern Mongolian activists.
Tibetans, especially, are on “the frontline of a climate crisis with the temperature of the plateau rising twice as fast as the rest of the world,” with over 2 million Tibetan nomads forced from their traditional grazing grounds in the name of grassland protection, the statement said.
In the same way, hundreds of thousands of Southern Mongolian herders and their families have been evicted from their land and relocated to areas predominantly populated by China’s majority Han ethnic group, the statement said.
Hunger strike
Ethnic Mongolian dissident Hada marked the day with a hunger strike with his family to highlight human rights abuses and ongoing harassment by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, long after his release from two decades in prison.
“Over the past five years, we have undergone unbearable ordeals,” Hada wrote in a brief statement translated and posted online by the U.S.-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights and Information Center (SMHRIC).
“All of our rights have either been taken away or restricted. We have been treated like criminals,” said the 60-year-old Hada, who was released from extrajudicial detention in December 2014, but his family’s bank accounts remain frozen by authorities.
Meanwhile, in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma, activists gathered on Thursday to celebrate at the Human Rights Defenders and Promoters Network (HRDP) office in Myanmar’s commercial capital, Yangon.
They had earlier been refused permission to hold the event at a local church, Aung Myo Min, director of the rights group Equality Myanmar, told RFA.
