Shaping The New World Order: The Battle For
Human Rights
China is
leading the charge in a bid to undermine accepted concepts of human rights
accountability and justice.
The Chinese effort backed by autocrats elsewhere has turned human rights
into an underrated, yet crucial battleground in the shaping of a new world
order.
China is manoeuvring against the backdrop of an unprecedented crackdown on Turkic Muslims in its north-western
province of Xinjiang, the accelerated rollout of restrictions elsewhere in the country,
and the export of key elements of its model of a 21st century
Orwellian surveillance state.
The Chinese effort, highlighted in Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2019, is multipronged.
It involves proposals to alter the principles on which United Nations
Human Rights Council operates in ways that would enable repressive, autocratic
regimes.
To achieve its goal, China is employing its financial muscle and
infrastructure and energy-driven Belt and Road initiative to economically
entice countries that are financially strapped, desperate for investment and/or
on the defensive because of human rights abuses.
China is also seeking a dominant role in various countries’ digital infrastructure and
media that would allow it to influence the flow of information and
enable its allies to better control dissent.
China is waging its campaign at a crucial juncture of history. It benefits
from the rise of ethno- and religious nationalism, populism, intolerance and
widespread anti-migration sentiment across the world’s democracies.
The campaign is enabled by the emergence of presidents like Donald J.
Trump in the United States, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Turkey’s Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Victor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro who have
either deemphasized human rights or gone as far as justifying abuses in
addition to seeking to limit, if not undermine, independent media that hold
them accountable.
The timing of the Chinese effort is significant because it comes at a
moment that predictions of the death of popular protest, symbolized by the
defeat of the initially successful 2011 popular Arab revolts, are being called
into question.
Mass anti-government demonstrations in Sudan demand the
resignation of President Omar al-Bashir. Anti-Chinese groups march in Kyrgyzstan while protests in Zimbabwe decry repression, poor public services,
high unemployment, widespread corruption and delays in civil servants receiving
their salaries. The past year has also seen widespread anti-government
agitation in countries like Morocco and Jordan.
The protests and what Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth
describes in his foreword to the group’s just published, 674-page World Report 2019 as “a resistance that keeps winning battles”
suggests that China’s campaign may have won battles but has yet to win the war.
“Victory isn’t assured but the successes of the past year suggest that
the abuses of authoritarian rule are prompting a powerful human rights
counterattack,” Mr. Roth wrote.
Nonetheless, Human Rights Watch’s China director Sophie Richardson
warned that “people outside China don’t yet seem to realize that their human rights
are…increasingly under threat as Beijing becomes more powerful… In
recent years, Beijing has…sought to extend its influence into, and impose its
standards and policies on, key international human rights
institutions—weakening some of the only means of accountability and justice
available to people around the world,”
Ms. Richardson noted that China had last year successfully pushed a
non-binding resolution in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) that advocated
promotion of human rights on the basis of the People’s Republic’s principle of
win-win, a principle that cynics assert means China wins twice.
In a sign of the times, the resolution garnered significant support. The
United States, in a twist of irony, was the only Council member to vote against
it with countries like Germany and Australia abstaining.
China is not the only country that would like a globally accepted
approach to be altered to the detriment of human rights. Muslim nations, with
Saudi Arabia in the lead, have, for example, long sought to have blasphemy
criminalized.
The resolution “gutted the ideas of accountability for actual human
rights violations, suggesting ‘dialogue’ instead. It failed to specify any
course of action when rights violators refuse to cooperate with UN experts,
retaliate against rights defenders or actively reject human rights principles.
And it even failed to acknowledge any role for the HRC itself to address
serious human rights violations when ‘dialogue’ and ‘cooperation’ don’t produce
results,” Ms. Richardson said.
“If these ideas become not just prevailing norms but also actual
operating principles for the HRC, victims of state-sponsored abuses
worldwide—including in Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—will face almost
impossible odds in holding abusive governments accountable,” Ms. Richardson
cautioned.
In a separate interview, Ms. Richardson described the resolution as “the
start of a process to wither away the UN human rights eco system.”
She said human rights groups were concerned “about what China will try
to do next, whether it will more aggressively try to change the council’s
mandate or nibble away at language in treaties or roll back the role of civil
society. China wants inter-governmental cooperation instead of accountability,
government officials discussing among themselves with no discussion of
accountability for abuses and no participation of independent groups.”
China’s efforts are both an attempt to rewrite international norms and
counter sharp Western criticism of its moves against Christians and Muslim and
its crackdown in Xinjiang.
Up to one million Turkic Muslims have reportedly been incarcerated in re-education camps that China projects as vocational training facilities.
To maintain its crackdown, China depends on a fragile silence in the Muslim world that is fraying at the
edges.
In addition to attempting to change the operating principles of the UN
Human Rights Commission, lobbying UN and foreign government officials to tone
down criticism and invited foreign diplomats and journalists on choreographed visits to
Xinjiang, China has at times successfully employed its economic and
financial clout to buy either support or silence.
Pakistan, the host of the Belt and Road’s US$45 billion crown jewel, has
curbed its initial criticism of the crackdown in Xinjiang.
Similarly, China is pressuring Myanmar to revive the suspended US$3.6
billion Myitsone dam project, which if built as previously designed would flood
600 square kilometres of forestland in northern Kachin state and export 90 % of
the power produced to China.
China has reportedly offered in return for the dam to support Myanmar
that has been condemned by the United Nations, Western countries and some
Muslim nations for its repressive campaign against the Rohingya, some 700,000
of which fled to Bangladesh last year.
In a bid to pacify, criticism of its Xinjiang policy in Central Asia
where anti-Chinese sentiment has been rising, China agreed this month to allow some 2,000 ethnic Kazakhs to renounce their Chinese citizenship and
leave the country.
The decision follows testimony in a Kazakh court of a former employee of
a re-education camp detailing three facilities in which up to 7,500 Kazaks and Chinese nationals
of Kazakh descent allegedly were being held. The testimony prompted
sharp criticism in parliament and on social media.
China and the West’s diametrically opposed concepts of human rights are
part of a larger contest for dominance over the future of technology and global
influence.
Freedom House, a Washington-based freedom watchdog, reported last year
that China was exporting to at least 18 countries sophisticated surveillance systems
capable of identifying threats to public order and has made it easier to
repress free speech in 36 others.
“They are passing on their norms for how technology should govern
society,” said Adrian Shahbaz, the author of the report.
Added Nadège Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian
Research, a Washington think tank, speaking to Bloomberg: “There’s a 1984 component to it that’s kind of scary.”
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