World Tibet Network News, Thursday, March 19, 1998

By Justin Jin

BEIJING, March 19 (Reuters) - A human rights group said on Thursday that a mission by U.S. clerics to China last month did not produce enough results for the United States to ease its pressure on Beijing over rights.

Three religious leaders, appointed by U.S. President Bill Clinton, travelled across China and made the first visit by a foreign religious delegation to Buddhist temples in Tibet and a prison where monks and nuns are jailed.

But the three-week trip, aimed at opening a dialogue on religion, did not achieve enough concrete results to justify the White House's backing off from censuring China on human rights, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

``The mission did not produce the kind of breakthrough that justified the Clinton administration's recent reversal on human rights,'' said the long-time critic of China's rights policies.

``The White House should not be allowed to use this visit as an excuse for abandoning virtually all forms of pressure on Beijing to improve its human rights performance,'' it said.

Clinton said last week he was moving his planned trip to China to late June from November to build on the momentum of improving Sino-U.S. ties.

The White House, citing progress on human rights by China, also said Washington would not sponsor a resolution condemning Beijing at the annual meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva which began on Tuesday.

The United States has supported resolutions critical of the communist country at the Geneva-based commission each year since Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations centred in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

New York Rabbi Arthur Schneier, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, New Jersey, and Don Argue, president of the National Association of Evangelicals toured Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hong Kong as well as remote Tibet.

``The delegation deserves credit for its principled approach,'' the statement said. ``But dialogue and discussions are no substitute for concrete action by China to ease its controls on religious expression.''

The group criticised the clerics for failing to secure the release of or get information on Chinese citizens believed to be detained for their faith.

``The delegation gave Chinese officials a list of 30 imprisoned religious activists, but failed to secure promises of their release,'' Human Rights Watch said.

``As far as we know, they also failed to obtain any significant new information about their whereabouts or legal status,'' it said.

Argue said on Wednesday he believed they had made progress towards the release of some prisoners but gave no details.

The human rights group said the delegation's visit to a Tibetan prison was a ``showcase tour'' used as propaganda by China.

The clerics said in a report that Chinese media did not use their tour to make a claim of complete religious freedom.

The clerics' visit to China was a result of a summit last October between Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, the first Sino-U.S. summit since the 1989 crackdown.

In an increasing sign of willingness to engage in a human rights dialogue, former Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen announced last week that Beijing planned to sign the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

China has given U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights Mary Robinson a standing invitation to visit, but no date has been set.

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