Montreal Gazette: Putting rights on the table

Wednesday 14 February 2001

No one is naive enough to think that China's leaders will rush to take Prime Minister Chretien's advice on human-rights issues. For all its economic and social reforms and its increasing complexity, the country remains a communist dictatorship, and its leaders remain as ready as ever to crush any serious sign of dissent.

Still, Mr. Chretien was right to raise human-rights concerns during the current Team Canada business mission to China, even if one did get the sense that his interventions were motivated in no small part by a desire to score points with Canadians (given the clamour here for such remarks).

While China's leaders might not especially want to liberalize, their desire to increase trade and to enhance their country's prestige internationally provide an incentive to pay attention, and sometimes even respond, to international pressure.

Mr. Chretien was overly optimistic, though, when he suggested that the fact that he can talk about human rights while in China is evidence of "a big improvement" in that area. Perhaps it's a step forward. But the fact remains that the human-rights situation in that country continues to be appalling.

The same day that Mr. Chretien lectured judges-in-training about the importance of a properly functioning judicial system and talked to Chinese President Jiang Zemin about repression in Tibet and the crackdown against the Falun Gong spiritual movement - Amnesty International published a report finding (to no one's surprise) that "Torture and ill-treatment of detainees and prisoners is widespread and systemic in China."

It also was the same day that two visiting Canadians who tried to demonstrate outside a Team Canada meeting quickly found themselves being whisked away by Chinese police (they were released after a few hours of questioning).

And it also was the concluding day of the closed-door trial of an Internet entrepreneur who was charged with "inciting the overthrow of state power" after material commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and dealing with other politically sensitive subjects, appeared on a Web site. No verdict was announced, but putting someone on trial for having exercised freedom of expression sends a clear, and chilling, message.

Mr. Chretien was right to stress the importance of a properly functioning legal system, a goal toward which China has indeed made some strides, in part with the help of a Canadian aid program. And, in an obvious effort to sell that concept, he stressed its importance not only in bringing justice, but also in fostering economic growth and social stability - two areas of prime concern to China's leaders. Mr. Chretien also was right to urge China to ratify two important international human-rights conventions.

It was a welcome shift from his earlier, flip remark about not being able to tell Canadian premiers what to do, let alone densely populated China. Yes, there are political realities. But there are also moral imperatives. In the face of rights abuses, silence is just plain wrong.