To The United Nations Human Rights Office of The High Commissioner & The United Nations Security Council,
By observing both the domestic human rights violation to the civil societies and the militarised actions of the Chinese government upon the South China Sea, this policy recommendation critiques for change and alternative policy approach and urges the United Nations Human Rights bodies continue to promote global dialogue with the Chinese government about their violations of human right in the dilemmas of the ICCPR provision and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (UDHR), on which China was a signatory.
The international community shows respect with the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence of the Chinese government, which includes “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.” (Asia For Educators, para. 2) Alongside, the international community congrats on China’s successful achievements in aspects of socio-economic development, and the valuable attempts to the promotion of international peace in Africa.
In order to heal and to build and to promote the global solidarity with mutual respect from one another’s prosperity and betterment, the international community calls China for having more careful actions to respect the common good and the human dignity to tightly cooperate with the international community with the above mission as the following reason.
Firstly, The Human Right Watch (HRW) (2013, para. 5) noticed that tortures and harassments, detains and imprisons to human rights activists are still serious, especially the case of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate – Liu Xiaobo, who has been accused of “inciting subversion of state power” served 11-year prison sentence. He was, as observed by the international community, the initiate for the Charter 08 which is a bold petition calling for democracy and the rule of the law and an end to censorship in China.
However, his death in 2017 elicited tremendous sorrow from both the Chinese right activists and international communities. Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said: “The human rights movement in China and across the world has lost a principled champion who devoted his life to defending and promoting human rights, peacefully and consistently, and who was jailed for standing up for his beliefs.” (The New York Times 2017, para. 9) Further noted from the HRW (2013, para. 6), since 120 scholars, lawyers, and journalists in China signed a petition to request the National People’s Congress to ratify the ICCPR, a number of individuals were arrested and detained due to the involvement, including Guo Feixiong – a Guangdong activist and Beijing activist Ding Jiaxi.
Secondly, the surroundings including the interpretation of human rights from the Chinese government and the “Asian values” must submit to the rights. In terms of international relations, the lessons from the past such as the Tian’anmen Square incidents of 1989 and the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-96 brought a strongly different perspective of the international communities with China, especially this intensified isolation and the potential threat from China to the world. Pradt (2016, p. 7) supposed that the image of China in the international community “was profoundly damaged” when the government let the military forces contravened the peaceful protests of those who were just Chinese students.
In the religious dimension, after Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, this event seemed to be repeated, as the international observers, by the suppression of the Falun Gong religious movements and the 1999 persecution. This was a somehow controversial issue in terms of human rights, which Adams (2013) supposed there were “immense exaggeration” with those practitioners.
Thirdly, as mentioned to the Taiwan Strait Crisis, this also necessarily mentions the cases of Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet. Those places and their land ownerships claimed and the acknowledgement to the land rights, where people have been faced conflicts, violent attacks, and religious discrimination in Xinjiang home to 10 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and Han migrants (HRW 2016).
This HRW document also stressed China’s disqualifying Hong Kong land ownership and declaring the recognition of this “inalienable part” of China. Therefore, two student leaders Joshua Wong and Alex Chow were prosecuted because of their peaceful protests for the independent and democratic regime of Hong Kong as one nation and the recognition of their own administrative independently from China. This is same with the Taiwan case, but Taiwan now has their first female president Tsai Ing-wen who has been in this position from 2016 until now.
Lastly, when it comes to the issue of Taiwan and the ownership of land and sea, it is tremendously shortcoming if not to mention the South China Sea (SCS) and China’s expansion. The world has been witnessing numerous encounters, naval clashes, confrontations and diplomatic rows occurred in the disputed sea areas from related countries for many decades. As Oishi (2015, p. 157-180) described that the SCS disputes were from under control from related countries in the late twentieth century, it then turned out escalating incompatible positions, goals and ideas since the twenty-first century began when it comes to the definition of sovereignty and jurisdiction.
Other countries like Vietnam which claimed the sovereignty in the sea waters with strong jurisdiction from historical perspective while countries like the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei do not wish to claim the sovereignty but the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and continental shelves acknowledged in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (The United Nations Oceans & Law of the Sea 2018; while China claims the rights for self-cultivating in the areas so-called the eleven dotted lines, the nine-dash line, and the U-shape. Historically speaking, all related countries are all signatories.
Under the human rights obligations and many United Nations Treaties and Agreements, the Chinese government has seriously violated. As stated by Sophie Richardson – Human Right Watch China Director (2016, para. 17), “The regime in Beijing is bent on systematically crushing independent civil society, producing laws that provide the thinnest of legal veneers to the worst rights violations, and exporting its lawless behaviour.” In order to maintain peace and security, from China perspective, the international community calls for one alternative policy recommendation, which wishes the Chinese government to agree and oblige.
That is the establishment of the national independent human rights observation and advisory commission. This body must be included in the political institution and through the monitor of the National Congress. This will effectively show the rights of the Politburo in running the government. This also fortifies the presidency leadership of China, who can represent truly level of meritocracy and bring the hope of change and betterment to the peoples and trust from the international community. In the legal dimension, this forms the justice for all human dignity, and the meritocratic leadership, albeit to the differences of Western values, is seeking for a China of prosperity and development.
The policy recommendation understands the aggregation of the legislative body in China and the Chinese government in the implementation. The international community and the United Nations is willing to help China to achieve the betterment for the Chinese people and the promotion of international peace and areas. The recommended policy bases on the high trust of the diplomatic strategy of China’s Communist Party and the ‘China Dream’, which constitutionalizes and institutionalizes the good for all and the respect of human dignity and the promotion of peace. By this understanding, it is the responsibility of the United Nations to respond and open global dialogue in advising China’s human rights issue and resolutions for peaceful diplomacy and agreements amongst related countries to the ICCPR and international human rights law.
Reference:
Adam, RJT 2013, ‘Falun Dafa/Falun Gong’, Chinese America: History and Perspectives, viewed 30 April 2018, <http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy2.acu.edu.au/ps/i.do?&id=GALE|A403167048&v=2.1&u=acuni&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&authCount=1#>
Asia For Educators, Principles of China’s Foreign Policy, viewed 29 April 2018, <http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1950_forpol_principles.htm>
Human Right Watch, 2013, China: Ratify key International Human Rights Treaty, viewed 30 April 2018, <https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/10/08/china-ratify-key-international-human-rights-treaty>
Human Rights Watch, 2016, China Events of 2016, viewed 30 April 2018, <https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/china-and-tibet>
Richardson, S 2016, ‘How to Deal With China’s Human Rights Abuses’, Human Rights Watch, viewed 1 May 2018, <https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/09/01/how-deal-chinas-human-rights-abuses>
The New York Time 2017, Liu Xiaobo, Chinese Dissident Who Won Nobel While Jailed, Died at 61, viewed 30 April 2018, <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/asia/liu-xiaobo-dead.html>
The United Nations Oceans & Law of the Sea 2018, Treaty Section site, viewed 30 April 2018, <http://www.un.org/depts/los/reference_files/status2018.pdf>
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