Beijing Throws Cold Water on Monday's Agreement With U.N.
BEIJING, NOV. 21, 2000 (ZENIT.org).- Beijing today appeared to defang a U.N. agreement on human rights that China's vice foreign minister signed only a day earlier.
Under the memorandum signed Monday with the United Nations, China agreed to U.N.-sponsored seminars on reforming its police, court and labor camp systems. The first meeting, scheduled for February, will address the power of police to send suspects to forced-labor camps for up to three years without trial.
The key objective of the agreement was to move Beijing toward implementing two U.N. treaties, one on economic, social and cultural rights; the other on civil and political rights.
The agreement, signed by Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, and Vice Foreign Minister Wang Guangya, was promptly criticized by rights groups as ineffective.
Moreover, when Communist Party Politburo member Li Tieying inaugurated a conference on economic rights in Beijing today, he insisted that human rights are relative.
"Each country and each ethnicity has the right to determine its own system for protecting human rights based on its own special conditions," Li said, in statements reported by Associated Press. China has often used this argument to justify economic development, even if it involves the violation of human dignity.
When her turn came to speak, the U.N.'s Mary Robinson urged China to accept "the universality of human rights," a concept underpinning the two U.N. treaties which Beijing has signed but not ratified.
President Jiang Zemin echoed Li's argument when he met with Robinson, saying that China has "its own way of promoting and protecting human rights," the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
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21. november 2000