GENEVA – A team of United Nations experts said on Monday that China was lagging in bringing human rights laws into line with international agreements and suggested this left the door open for continued abuse of dissenters.
The four-member group from the U.N. Human Rights Commission – just back from a 12-day visit to China – also recorded “regret” that it was not allowed to see some prisoners it had asked to interview in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.
As a result, a statement from the group said, it cut short its visit to Lhasa’s Drapchi Prison, where Tibetan exiles say many prisoners were beaten by guards after complaining about their treatment to a U.N. team seven years ago.
But the group, formally the Commission’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, said in a three-page report that overall the Chinese government had shown “more cooperation and transparency” than during its previous visits in 1996 and 1997.
It also welcomed the recent insertion of a clause into the Chinese constitution declaring that the state “respects and preserves human rights” and assurances it said it had been given by officials that other changes were on the way.
But the U.N. group – headed by Algerian lawyer Leila Zerrougi and Hungarian jurist Tamas Ban – said it “would like to stress that at this stage the four recommendations formulated in its 1997 report have not yet been implemented.”
Among these were inclusion in the criminal code of a clear statement on presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and a clear definition of “endangering national security” – a charge rights groups say is widely used against dissent.
There had also been no action on point three, that Chinese law should ensure a clear exemption from criminal responsibility for people “peacefully exercising their rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the group said.
The New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch says protesters on issues ranging from housing and labour problems to the dominant role of the ruling Communist Party are routinely arrested and charged with criminal offences.
The U.N. experts said there had also been no move on their fourth 1997 recommendation: an end to the long-standing practice of sending people to “re-education through labour” camps without judicial order or control.
In another stricture, the group said that “some of the (Chinese) authorities in detention-related matters … do not seem to realise that the safeguards against arbitrariness provided by international standards must be respected.”
Human rights groups have expressed concern that China is using the war on terrorism as an excuse to crack down on Tibet and the western, largely Muslim, region of Xinjiang.
The U.N. special rapporteur (investigator) on torture, Dutch law professor Theo van Boven, said in June that China had postponed his long-awaited visit until “sometime later this year.” His predecessor, Sir Nigel Rodley, had tried unsuccessfully since 1996 to visit China.
