FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, March 5, 1998
For more information, contact: Sean Crowley
202/463-7575, x241, or 202/213-5574 (Cell)
Clinton Administration Undecided about U.N. Resolution on China, Despite Congressional Pressure & Impending U.N. Meeting in Geneva
Washington, D.C. - As both houses of Congress Thursday consider resolutions urging President Clinton to pursue a United Nations resolution on China's human rights practices, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights called on the administration to initiate this effort without further delay. The Senate is scheduled to debate a China resolution at 12pm Thursday in the form of an amendment to a transportation bill (ISTEA) and the House International Relations Asia and Pacific Subcommittee meets at 2pm Thursday to mark up a similar resolution. Both resolutions urge U.S. action on China at this year's session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which begins March 16 in Geneva.
"The administration's commitment to seek a resolution addressing China's human rights abuses at the Commission on Human Rights is the last piece of a U.S. human rights policy toward China that has already lost most of its teeth," said James Silk, director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights. "There can be no principled justification for abandoning the effort this year when, as the administration acknowledges, China has failed to make meaningful progress on meeting its human rights obligations."
The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, the world's leading international human rights forum, meets for six weeks every spring. Each year since China's brutal suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement, the U. S. has joined a multilateral effort to gain consideration and passage of a Commission resolution about the human rights situation in China. Each year, the proposed resolution makes moderate criticisms of the Chinese government's human rights practices and modest recommendations for improving them.
The government of China has conducted an intense international lobbying campaign every year to prevent the Commission from considering the China resolution. China has often released a few political prisoners and taken other small positive steps in the period leading up to the annual Commission session. Only in 1995, when the United States engaged in an early and aggressive effort, has China failed to block consideration of its human rights record. That year, the resolution fell one vote short of passing.
In a letter to President Clinton last month, the RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights and eight other human rights organizations stated: "Beijing has demonstrated that it is sensitive to external pressure and criticism of its human rights record. China would not have made even these minimal concessions without the prospect of the Commission resolution. The value of the resolution is its utility as a tool to help bring about further improvements."
The Clinton Administration has stated repeatedly that only significant, concrete improvements in the human rights situation in China would justify reconsideration of the U.S. commitment to seek passage of a Commission resolution on China.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 17, 1997, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Stanley Roth, said: "[I]f we can get significant progress, not minimal, then we can make a judgment that it wouldn't be necessary to go forward. . . . [I]t would have to be a significant degree of progress that would, I think, have considerable public support and congressional support. It could not be pro forma."
Only a month ago, on February 3, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor John Shattuck, testifying at a hearing before the House Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, said: "We do not see major changes. We have not characterized China as having demonstrated major changes."
Ten days ago, on February 23, the European Union, which has sponsored and supported the China resolution in the past, announced that it would not do so this year. The EU cited several recent steps that China has taken as reasons for dropping the resolution: China's signing of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: its invitation to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit China; its negotiations with the International Committee of the Red Cross over possible future visits to China's prisons; the 1997 visit to China by the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; and the release from prison of prodemocracy activist and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award laureate Wei Jingsheng.
"We can welcome China's recent gestures without pretending that they are the significant steps the United States has consistently said it would take to stop pursuing the U.N. resolution," said Silk. "And it is important to keep Wei Jingsheng's release from prison in perspective. He was forced to leave the country. If he tries to return to China, he will be imprisoned again. He has stressed that thousands of others remain in harsh prison conditions merely for exercising their fundamental human rights. And he has stated unequivocally to the U.S. government that his release should not serve as an excuse to abandon the Geneva effort."
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Sean Crowley
Communications Director
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial
1367 Connecticut Ave., NW
Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
Phone:(202) 463-7575, ext. 241
FAX: (202) 463-6606
Email: crowleys@rfkmemorial.org
