By YANG Jianli
March 13, 2012
Good morning, my friends. And good day.
I say good day because any time friends join together to openly dedicate themselves to the collaborative work of advancing human rights and democracy, it is a good day. As the United Nations Human Rights Council holds its main annual session, our Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy is assembling hundreds of courageous dissidents and human rights activists, diplomats and student leaders, to shine a spotlight and call for action on urgent human rights situations that require global attention. And so let me say again, good morning and good day.
Of course, although it is morning in this beautiful city, on this very good day, we know too that we are gathered in the shade of shadows—shadows cast by human rights abuses; shadows cast by human rights abusers.
The Syrian autocracy’s continuing brutal crackdown on its own people is today the most visible example of the bad and predictable habits of corrupt and unaccountable power.
But while we watch and read in horror as the Assad regime murders Syrian citizens, while we deplore the senseless carnage visited upon our Syrian brothers and sisters, and while we lament that more than sixty years after the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the world still cannot prevent atrocities like those taking place today in Syria, we should be grateful to the Syrian people for courageously reminding us that human dignity does not compromise when it demands recognition.
We should also be grateful to the Syrian people for reminding us that the work we do here, in Geneva, is concretely connected to their struggle.
You see, I come from China. And just as the people of Syria have friends in people of conscience around the globe, their oppressor has a friend in the Chinese regime.
The Chinese regime that massacred innocent civilians and students in 1989 is the same regime still in power today. This is the same regime that is pursuing cultural genocide on our Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian brothers. This is the same regime whose paranoid fear allows it to imprison and torture its best and brightest citizens.
The list of the Chinese government’s crimes against its own citizens goes on and on. The number of the regime’s victims runs into the millions, including the 27 Tibetan self-immolators in the recent three years. And This is the same regime whose foreign policies and models of repression enable the morally and philosophically bankrupt regimes of North Korea, Iran, Syria, and so on, to suck the lives, freedoms, dignities and wealth from their people.
Then what is China’s punishment for this scandalous behavior?
When it comes to the UN, there is no punishment. Quite the contrary, China is rewarded for its behavior with a seat on the world’s highest human rights body, the UN Human Rights Council. It also has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, where it can exercise its veto with impunity.
As a result of this farcical arrangement, the Chinese government—an unaccountable and illegitimate power that does not even represent its own people—is able to influence how other countries, indeed, how other dictatorships, treat their people.
No country that behaves this way towards its own citizens has a place on the UN Human Rights Council. No country.
And no country that uses its veto power to prevent UN condemnation of atrocities against the people of another country like those taking place in Syria has any right to the power it has been given by the United Nations. No country.
Indeed, we must ask ourselves serious questions: Why should any dictatorship have a say in world human affairs when it does not allow a voice to its own citizens? Who does a dictatorship represent when it takes its seat at the UN? More importantly, who and what is the UN choosing to recognize when it grants a dictatorship power in a committee or on the Security Council?
In the case of China, the consequences of the dictatorship’s power for the people of China is clear enough. So too are the consequences of its power at the UN for the people of Syria. All of these consequences are unacceptable. If China were a pupil in elementary school, its progress reports would never stop reading, “must do better.” But because it is not a pupil in elementary school, but a powerful nation at the UN, its progress reports always read, “good enough.”
But that’s not good enough for the advancement of human rights. “Special friendships” between dictatorships cannot be allowed to continue at the UN.
The continued existence of dictatorships in today’s world is an embarrassment to common sense and to our common humanity. Dictatorships today exist as desperate anachronisms, clinging as they do to the nearest and most convenient justifications—be they cultural, historical, or economic—to maintain power.
Human rights heroes from Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and other countries will testify today at this summit that their struggles have demonstrated and will continue to demonstrate just how flimsy these justifications are. We are very much looking forward to hearing their inspiring testimony.
We should be grateful to these heroes for reminding us that tyranny’s desperate wars against fundamental human dignity are bound to fail. History progresses and older methods of control are swept away as concentrated and illegitimate power faces increased opposition from more and more forces demanding freedom from domination, as has been most recently evidenced by the Arab spring and the opening up in Burma and will surely be proved again and again by the people’s struggle in China, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and other world remaining autocracies. This is the promise of democracy in our own times.
This is truly a good day. But I must remind you, my dear friends, that it says a lot about the work that must be done that the discussion we are having here today must take place outside of the official United Nations meetings. Clearly, we have a great deal to do.
And let us make no mistake as we move forward—the international interconnectedness of our work must always be at the front of our minds. The problems of the people of China are our problems because they are the problems of the people of Syria; the problems of the people of Syria are our problems because they are the problems of the people of Iran, of North Korea, of Russia, and so on. They are the problems that we must confront honestly, energetically, and forthrightly today in order to make good days possible for more and more people tomorrow.
