Published by: World Tibet Network News Thursday - May 15, 1997

PARIS, May 14 (Reuter) - French human rights groups urged President Jacques

Chirac on Wednesday to raise the fate of pro-democracy dissidents during a

coming state visit to China.

The French League of Human Rights (LDH) urged Chirac to make a significant

gesture during the visit, starting on Thursday, to erase what it called

France's disastrous image with Chinese democrats after it refused to back a

United Nations resolution condemning human rights violations in China.

The LDH asked Chirac to meet or pay tribute to dissidents, including Wei

Jingsheng, who is serving a 14-year sentence, and Ding Zilin, who has been

compiling the names of those who died in the repression of pro-democracy

supporters since her son was killed near Tiananmen square in 1989.

Wei, regarded as the father of China's modern democracy movement, was

sentenced in December 1995 on charges of plotting to overthrow the

government.

Nominated several times in recent years for the Nobel Peace Prize, Wei was

arrested in April 1994, just six months after being freed on parole after

serving all but six months of a 15-year term for subversion.

The press freedom watchdog Reporters without Borders (RSF) also pleaded for

Wei and urged Chirac to intervene with Chinese leaders in favour of 12

journalists "imprisoned only because they practised their profession."

"They are being held in most cases in disastrous conditions ignoring

respect for human dignity," RSF said.

RSF, the LDH and the group Human Rights in China said they had written to

candidates in France's forthcoming parliamentary election, asking them to

take a public stand on China.

They asked candidates to commit themselves to press the French government

to raise human rights violations in China in a new U.N. resolution.

The groups also urged politicians to condemn forced and child labour in

China and to pressure the French government to officially receive the

exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, when he next visits

France.

Main aim of Chirac's state visit is to boost France's share of trade with

China. It missed out on China's economic boom in the early 1990s after the

late Socialist president Francois Mitterrand criticised the 1989 crackdown

on a student-led democracy movement in Beijing and sold fighter planes and

warships to Taiwan.

A visit to Beijing by then conservative prime minister Edouard Balladur in

1994 was marred by the detention of prominent human rights activists

apparently timed to show that the Communist rulers were immune to foreign

pressure.

French officials insist China is making progress in enacting laws

enshrining civil rights, despite fierce criticism by human rights

organisations.

Chirac spokeswoman Catherine Colonna, asked if the president would raise

human rights issues in Beijing, said he would stress dialogue rather than

confrontation during this "important, delicate phase" of reforms in China.

But he might take up individual cases discreetly and would also make a

speech on "the rule of law" at Beijing's civil service college on Friday.

Chirac's diplomatic adviser Jean-David Levitte was reported to have told

representatives of several human rights groups last week that the president

would raise human rights issues and try to convince Chinese leaders that

the Dalai Lama's demands for talks on Tibet were quite moderate.

"Human rights cannot be a subject for quiet discussions behind closed

doors. They must be proclaimed loud and clear," RSF President Noel Copin

said in a column in the influential newspaper Le Monde.