Human Rights Being Discussed More Openly in China: UNDP

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Human Rights Being Discussed More Openly in China: UNDP

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A senior United Nations human rights official has said that human rights issues are being discussed more frequently and more openly in China since the country's ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights two years ago.

In an interview with China's bimonthly magazine "Human Rights",Kerstin Leitner, resident representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to China, has called the ratification of the Covenant "truly a milestone event" in China's efforts to embrace international human rights standards and principles.

"Since then, I have seen many more references to human rights, much more openness than before to discuss human rights issues," Leitner told the magazine, which published the interview in its third issue this year.

The debate which took place in preparation for ratification caused many people in the leading Communist Party of China, in the National People's Congress, China's supreme legislature, and in academic institutions to think more carefully about what it means in practice, Leitner noted.

"So when the Covenant was ratified, I think many more people were convinced that this was a useful tool for pursuing China's reform and development agenda," she added.

The UNDP representative, who has been in China for more than five years, elaborated on the changes brought about by the ratification of the Covenant.

"Before the ratification, everyone felt nervous, but after the ratification, people felt comfortable dealing with human rights issues," she said.

However, she conceded that there are still many questions which arise when applying human rights to economic, social and cultural, and eventually, to civil and political rights.

"To find the right response to arising issues, a lot of interaction, a lot of debate is necessary, to ensure that the protection of the rights of individual citizens is realized in the concrete situation of the country, and a strong legal system has to be in place," she said.

Talking about the ongoing cooperation between her office and the Chinese government in the field of human rights, Leitner said that her office's role is to make sure that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and his staff are comprehensively briefed on what is going on in China.

"We need to avoid that for lack of information a situation is misjudged, leading to misunderstandings," she stressed.

The UNDP is currently carrying out a program in support of China's legal system reform, which complements the technical assistance cooperation that the Human Rights High Commissioner has worked on with Chinese institutions, she noted.

Asked to comment on the human rights situation in the world today, Leitner recalled that in 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was truly a visionary document in that it had anticipated that, in the wake of World War II, countries would become closer and more interdependent, that they would have more economic, social and cultural exchanges and that it was necessary to make human rights an integral part of the international community.

"It is on the basis of these human rights principles that we can work for peace and development," said Leitner.

Today, she said, as we are experiencing globalization, human rights principles have become the value system in the background of globalization.

"We value that each and every one of us, irrespective of where we are, whether we are tall or small, whether we are poor or rich, whether we are women or men, whether we are in a poor country or in a rich country, that we are all equal, we all have the right to be treated with the same dignity, we all have the right not to go hungry, to have a chance to live," she said.

"This is what human rights are about. And I think, generally, that the world is only slowly realizing this. First we created the values system, now we also have to use it, because we cannot just trade with each other, we cannot just visit each other as tourists," she said, adding that "we truly have to be able to live with each other on the basis of mutual respect."

"Since 1948, the international community has built up an impressive body of human rights protection instruments," she asserted, citing the fact that key documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international human rights covenants and some of the subsidiary conventions have been formulated, signed and ratified by many countries.

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