Broken Promises for Human Rights in China

Joseph Loconte

Though painfully overdue, a leading human-rights organization has finally focused serious and sustained attention on a leading human-rights abuser: China. In a scathing report released ten days before the Olympic Games in Beijing, Amnesty International has concluded that China “continues to persecute and punish” those who advocate for human rights and democratic reform.

The 17-page report, “The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises,” notes some positive steps taken by the government in Beijing. Nevertheless, it describes continuing abuses, including detention without trial, the persecution of rights activists, and the lack of media freedom. “In fact, the crackdown on human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers has intensified because Beijing is hosting the Olympics,” the report notes. “The authorities have stepped up repression of dissident voices in their efforts to present an image of ‘stability’ and ‘harmony’ to the outside world.”

There are an estimated 500,000 people in China under punitive detention without charge or trial—yes, at least half a million. Meanwhile, millions more cannot access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances. Now compare this system of institutionalized repression to the seething controversy over the 265 or so detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Most of the detainees are suspected terrorists apprehended during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. The U.S. military considers 120 of the detainees to be too dangerous to release, but lacks the evidence to try them. There are important human-rights questions surrounding Guantanamo Bay, as the recent Supreme Court ruling on detainees suggests. Yet the barbarism of Islamist radicals—their thirst to acquire weapons of mass destruction, their willingness to pose as civilians on the battlefield, and their indiscriminate killing of women and children—makes the struggle against them a moral obligation, with all its ambiguities.

Too many critics of the United States have lost sight of these facts. They forget that oppressive states such as Communist China have been engaged in a contest not against terrorism, but against the democratic norms of free speech, freedom of association, and, most importantly, freedom of religion. Political and religious liberals fulminate over America’s “tarnished image” in the world, but remain shamefully mute as hundreds of thousands languish in Chinese prisons because they dared to assert their natural rights.

Amnesty International deserves credit for its China report, even if it produces only a spasm of conscience and clarity among America’s cultured despisers.

Fodder, Good and Evil, Religious Liberty, Joseph Loconte, Tue 29 Jul 2008