• by Joel Uppvall (washington)
• Friday, February 13, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Seven major U.S. and international rights groups are calling on U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make human rights issues a top priority in her meetings in Beijing next week with Chinese officials.

In a letter to Clinton released Friday, the groups, which include Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch, said that human rights should be considered an integral part of Washington's policy toward China.

'We are acutely aware that the U.S. agenda with China is a broad one,' wrote the groups, which also included Human Rights First and Human Rights in China. 'But we believe that the desired economic, security, and diplomatic progress can be reinforced through more vigorous and public defense of human rights.'

The letter comes on the eve of Clinton's maiden voyage overseas. As the secretary of state prepared for her tour in Asia, she received the letter calling on her to make human rights the major topic of discussion when she visits China.

The letter is signed by seven human rights groups and states that 'our organizations strongly urge you to make human rights issues a prominent topic in your public and private discussions with the Chinese leadership and people'.

Clinton will visit Japan (Feb. 16-18), Indonesia (Feb. 18-19), the Republic of Korea (Feb. 19-20), and China (Feb. 20-22).

In all the capitals she is visiting, Clinton will be discussing common approaches to the various challenges that the international community is facing. Some of the issues are climate change, turmoil in the financial markets and human rights.

In Tokyo, she will take up cooperation on regional and global issues, and in Jakarta she will focus on the growing U.S partnership with Indonesia and perspectives on common interests in Southeast Asia. In Seoul, Clinton will meet with senior leaders of the Republic of Korea to discuss an expanding cooperative partnership.

In Beijing, Clinton is also hoping to deepen bilateral cooperation on a range of issues, from coping with the ongoing global financial crisis and climate change to the de-nuclearisation of North Korea and enhancing military ties and transparency. But the letter sent to Clinton by the human rights groups urges her to put pressure on the country during her visit.

'This will be the crucial moment to signal to the Chinese government that the quality of its relationship with the United States will depend in part on whether it lives by universally accepted human rights norms in its domestic and foreign policies,' the letter says.

The human rights groups go on to list a number of issues they hope Clinton will raise, among them, the Chinese government's handling of Tibet and Xinjiang, censorship of the domestic press, torture and abuse of human rights defenders.

Clinton already has a history of addressing human rights issues in China. When she visited Beijing for the U.N.'s Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, she said that respect for human rights meant 'not taking citizens away from their loved ones and jailing them, mistreating them, or denying them freedom or dignity because of the peaceful expression of their ideas and opinions.'

During the administration of former President George W. Bush, Washington established a 'strategic economic dialogue' and a 'senior dialogue' covering security issues. Clinton has already said that she wants to lay the foundation for a more 'comprehensive dialogue'.

In a speech at the Asia Society in New York Friday, Clinton addressed some possible issues for her visit to the region.

'As part of our dialogues, we will hold ourselves and others accountable, as we work to expand human rights and create a world that respects those rights, one where Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi can live freely in her own country [Burma], where the people of North Korea can freely choose their own leaders, and where Tibetans and all Chinese People can enjoy religious freedom without fear of prosecution,' she said.

The issue of human rights in China is also relevant due to last December's release of Charter 08, a political manifesto by Chinese intellectuals which, among other things, called for freedom of expression and free elections of public officials.

Its publication led to the arrest of scholar-activist Liu Xiaobo, who was one of the driving forces behind the charter. The arrest was followed by a letter directly addressed to President Hu Jintao, signed by more than 60 scholars and writers outside mainland China, demanding Liu's release.

However, the matter of the U.S. pushing China on the issue of human rights could be delicate. The economies of the two countries have become so closely interwoven, according to most experts, that they will have to cooperate very closely to recover from the current financial crisis.

At the moment, Washington depends on China's willingness to keep buying U.S. Treasury bills to fund its stimulus package. In that respect, Washington's willingness to make demands on Beijing with respect to human rights or other issues on which China has shown reluctance to make concessions carries major risks.

On the other hand, the health of China's own economy depends to a not insignificant extent on the willingness of U.S. consumers to buy its exports.

'The difficulty is not just that the timing is off,' Minxin Pei, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the New York Times recently. 'Rebalancing the relationship means introducing elements that have friction. Those areas that have been ignored are precisely the more contentious ones.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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