World Tibet Network News Tuesday, March 17th, 1998

by Tani Freedman

GENEVA, March 17 (AFP) - The European Union Tuesday defended its decision not to sponsor a resolution condemning human rights abuses in China at the UN Human Rights Commission session, saying it wished to avoid last year's "debacle."

"This year it's right that we won't support a resolution," said Tony Lloyd, British minister of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs.

"That's in recognition that there is now a dialogue taking place with China and that dialogue has already begun to have some impact," Lloyd, speaking on behalf of the European Commission, told journalists.

He earlier told commission delegates that the EU would not be drafting a resolution on China at the six-week session which started Monday, because of "positive" signals from Beijing.

These include the release of political dissident Wei Jingsheng in November, and a pledge made last week to sign the UN convention on civil and political rights.

Beijing authorities have also promised to allow in a UN working group on arbitrary detentions and have extended an official invitation to the UN commissioner on human rights, Mary Robinson.

"The debacle that took place last year is not something we would want to see repeated," Lloyd said.

The EU broke ranks over the issue of censuring China in 1997, with France, Germany and Italy opposed to any official condemnation. In the end, Denmark sponsored a resolution, backed Britain and the United States and a handful of other countries.

But that resolution was defeated by China which has killed all attempts to chasten it at the commission for the past nine years.

Washington recently stated it would also not back any China motion this year. US President Bill Clinton will pay a state visit to China in late June, the Chinese foreign ministry announced Tuesday.

That will make him the first US president to set foot in the country since George Bush did so in February 1989, four months before the brutal military crackdown of students in Tiananmen square.

Said Lloyd: "We're not saying to the Chinese there is no (human rights) problem. Rather the opposite, but the question is one of tactics."

"The point is to make an assessment as to how best we take human rights in China foward."

"In no sense is this is a permanent position or expression of lack of concern. Its simply a practical, hard-headed review."

The list of human rights concerns in China revolves around individual political rights cases, the death penalty, and the supression of religious and cultural freedoms, particularly in Tibet, Lloyd said.

The EU would closely review progress, or the lack of it, in China over the next 12 months.

Lloyd rejected charges that European governments placed more importance on promoting commercial interests in China than they did a human rights agenda.

Britain, which co-sponsored the motion against China at the commission last year, should "not be accused as a country operating out of narrow self interest. Our historical record simply does not bear this out," he said.