2017-04-07
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U.S. First Lady Melania Trump (R) and President Donald Trump (2nd R) welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping (2nd L) and his wife Peng Liyuan (L) to the Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, April 6, 2017.
AFP
As U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met for the first time in Florida, rights groups hit out at the apparent absence of human rights from an agenda dominated by North Korea’s nuclear program, Taiwan and trade.
“Any absence of human rights from the agenda … would risk emboldening governments across the globe to pursue divisive, toxic and dehumanizing politics,” London-based Amnesty International said in a statement as Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan sat down to dinner with Trump and First Lady Melania Trump at Trump’s Spanish-style Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday evening.
The two leaders began Thursday with cordial meetings during which Xi called for cooperation with the United States on trade and investment and invited Trump to visit China. With more substantial talks scheduled for Friday, Trump was expected to raise longstanding concerns about China’s trade practices and press Xi to do more to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Calling on Xi and Trump to place human rights “at the heart” of their meeting’s agenda, Amnesty’s Secretary General Salil Shetty warned the world is heading “in a very dangerous direction.”
“This meeting comes as both presidents are rolling back human rights protections, impacting millions of people in China, the US and across the globe,” Shetty said.
“From refugees turned away at the U.S. border to human rights lawyers languishing in Chinese prisons, the consequences of their contempt for human rights are devastating,” he added.
Amnesty hit out at Trump’s “hateful xenophobic” travel ban that aims to stop people in several majority Muslim countries from entering the U.S., and the lifting of human rights conditions on the sale of fighter jets to Bahrain for potential use in the bombing of Yemeni civilians.
Meanwhile, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) detailed a litany of Beijing’s rights abuses to lay at Xi’s door.
“Torture, disappearances, imprisoning peaceful advocates, destroying religious communities, internet censorship – President Xi has plenty to answer for on these subjects,” HRW China director Sophie Richardson said ahead of the presidential summit.
Major crackdown on lawyers
China launched a nationwide police operation targeting more than 300 rights lawyers in July 2015 that has seen six lawyers and rights activists sentenced and another eight held in secret locations with no access to a lawyer.
In the U.S., Jin Bianling, whose human rights lawyer husband Jiang Tianyong is currently detained in China, said she had written to President Trump about him ahead of their meeting.
“I wrote the fourth letter from the families of the July 2015 detainees to Trump,” Jin told RFA.
“I called on Trump and Xi Jinping to discuss the release of the human rights lawyers detained in that crackdown, and all prisoners of conscience.”
And the wife of jailed Guangzhou rights lawyer Tang Jingling, known by his nickname “China’s Gandhi,” said she had sent a similar letter.
“The [human rights] situation back in China is looking really bad right now,” U.S.-based Wang Yanfang told RFA.
“But since I came to the U.S., I have met a number of … senators and representatives in Congress who care enough to raise the cases of political prisoners, which gives their relatives so much hope,” she said.
Peaceful critics of the ruling Chinese Communist Party are routinely jailed on subversion or state security charges, or “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” HRW said.
“[In all cases] the legal proceedings have fallen far short of international standards,” it said.
‘Brutality and repression’
Meanwhile, internal disciplinary investigations have seen large numbers of officials locked up under Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, where they have been subjected to “prolonged sleep deprivation, forced stress positions, deprivation of water and food, and in some cases severe beatings,” the group said.
It cited the ongoing expulsion and “political re-education” of Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns and the demolition of Buddhist teaching institution Larung Gar.
“No one should be fooled by a man and a government who preside through brutality and repression,” Richardson said. “Xi’s record speaks for itself.”
Amnesty International meanwhile cited a recent series of draconian “national security” laws that have legalised the crackdown on peaceful dissidents through the use of political charges and secret detentions.
According to Shetty, the laws are putting a “chokehold” on civil society.
“These are dark times for human rights in China,” Shetty said. “The authorities are … showing a total disregard for international human rights law.”
Amnesty also hit out at Beijing for using its veto action at the U.N. to prevent sanctions being imposed on those responsible for mass atrocities in Syria, and at the U.S. for being “willing to shield Israel from scrutiny for its serious human rights violations.”
“If two of the world’s most powerful leaders continue to side-line human rights it will have a devastating domino effect, placing established human rights protections in jeopardy and lead to further crises,” Shetty said.
