ICFTU OnLine…
280/981222/LD
Arrests in China: time to reassess soft diplomacy, says ICFTU
Brussels, December 22 1998 (ICFTU OnLine): The latest sentences imposed on China's free labour and democracy activists should lead foreign governments and international organisations to seriously reassess their strategy of soft diplomacy concerning human rights violations in that country, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) said today in Brussels.
The Brussels-based international trade union group condemned the harsh sentences passed on democracy activists Xu Wenli, condemned to 13 years imprisonment, and of Wang Yucai, to 11 years, whose only crime has been to try and set up a new political party and call for trade union freedoms.
Commenting on the release on medical parole and expulsion to the United Sates of veteran labour activist Liu Nianchun, ICFTU General Secretary Bill Jordan said "it "strictly followed the standard procedure now meted out to free union activists: arrest and sentence them without any legal basis, then torture and deny them medical care for a few years in forced labour camps, before finally releasing them into forced exile and claiming international recognition for China's "rapidly improving human rights' record"". The ICFTU said Liu Nianchun had been severely tortured on several occasions and was released "only when his medical condition had made his continued detention unmanageable for China's government".
The ICFTU charges are detailed in a unpublished report, entitled "Torture and ill-treatment of detained trade union right's and labour activists and their relatives". Details of the ICFTU report were discussed with the Chinese government when an EU delegation visited Beijing last October. Liu's case featured prominently in a list of 24 detained labour activists raised with the authorities by SOS-Torture, a Geneva-based NGO invited by the EU's Austrian presidency to take part in the October round of the "EU-China Human Rights' Dialogue".
The ICFTU report, designed as an informal contribution to the EU-China dialogue, was initially supposed to be discussed in Beijing by the ICFTU itself. But, last July, a top-level ICFTU delegation to China was called off at the last minute, when Beijing's official trade union organisation said it would refuse to discuss the situation of trade union prisoners in China with senior international trade union leaders composing the ICFTU delegation.
"Continuing to sentence workers for providing legal information to scores of thousands of newly unemployed workers and to condemn democracy activists for having quoted China's Constitution as basis for independent political activity makes a sham of Beijing's widely-acclaimed signature of the two main UN human rights Covenants", the ICFTU said. "By introducing strict reservations to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Beijing also mocks the EU's, the US' and other international organisations' unfounded, self-congratulatory statements, every time they claim their efforts have "persuaded Beijing through diplomatic dialogue to improve their human rights' record". "So far, the only result we can see from this discreet dialogue is the increase in the number of trade union detainees".
The Brussels-based ICFTU represents over 125 million unionised workers, through its 200 affiliated national union centres in 144 countries and territories.
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU)
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please contact: Luc Demaret on: 00 322 224 0212 - press@icftu.org