IFC Will Present Open Letter to UN Secretary General on June 4, 2011

Open Letter to the Secretary-General of United Nations

His Excellency Ban Ki-moon

The United Nations

1 United Nations Plaza

New York, New York 10017-3515

CC:     Member States of the UN Security Council, Member States of the UN Human Rights Council, and European Parliament

June 4, 2011

Dear Mr. Secretary-General:

Twenty-two years ago today, Chinese Communist dictators, responding to student-led pro-democracy protests, called out tens of thousands of troops to “crush a counter-revolutionary riot.” In a spasm of unimaginable violence, heavily armed soldiers and tanks attacked peaceful protesters. They shot at unarmed Chinese in and near Tiananmen Square, resulting in the death and maiming of thousands of their own citizens.

Young men and women vanished beneath tank tracks or lost their limbs. Others perished in a hail of gunfire from soldiers using assault rifles. Mothers lost their only sons and daughters. Children were orphaned, left to forever miss their parent’s love and warm embrace.  Families were shattered. This was the single most tragic day in the history of modern China.

The criminals who authorized this evil bloodletting and the henchmen who committed it on their behalf – these killers were left unpunished. And some still occupy positions of power inside China’s present day government where they continue to abuse Chinese citizens.

In 1998, the regime engaged in mass arrests and imprisonment of democracy activists attempting to form their own political parties. In 1999, it began a campaign of harassment, imprisonment and torture of tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners, many of whom died from this brutality.  In 2008, the regime persecuted the signers of Charter 08 led by Liu Xiaobo to call for a constitutional reform. After anonymous calls by Chinese people for a Jasmine Revolution in February, more arrests, detentions and disappearances of dissidents and human rights defenders followed.

And it is not only political activists who face constant harassment and detention.  The Chinese government has heaped additional pain and insult on the parents of children who died in the 2008 earthquake by arresting them for peacefully petitioning their government for the truth about their children’s death.  The same has happened to parents of children who died from drinking tainted milk.  For decades, the Chinese government has been implementing its cruel policies of forced abortions, large-scale illegal evictions, and land grabbing and acquisition without just compensation.  Today, all of China’s citizens are in danger of being labeled as “a national threat”, simply for asking their own government for accountability.

We draw your attention to the empty chair at the peace prize ceremony this past December in Oslo for a June 4th protests leader, Liu Xiaobo, who is still jailed in the Chinese prison, and for his entire extended family, including his wife, being held hostage now by the Chinese regime, to alert you to an ever worsening human right situation in China.

This situation has a clear starting point – June 4th, 1989 – and all subsequent gross human rights violations are a continuation of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.  Over the past 22 years, the Chinese regime has ruthlessly suppressed any individual, or ethnic, religious or civic group that stands up to defend their own rights.  Every corner of China—from Lhasa to Urumqi to Beijing—is experiencing systematic human rights violations.

We can tell you that not a single day has gone by within the past 22 years without the Chinese Communist regime “cracking down” on peaceful activists and citizens defending their rights.  These crackdowns serve to prove that the Chinese regime feels itself to be above international human rights norms and the expressed laws made by the regime itself in its own constitution.

The regime’s willingness to abrogate both domestic and international rules is a threat to people well beyond China’s borders. Just recently, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi justified his slaughtering of Libyan citizens by citing the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China. Gaddafi could only dare to make this type of disgraceful justification for murder because the international community had failed then, and fails now, to punish China’s Communist dictators’ past and current criminal behavior.

With respect to Libya, we wholeheartedly applaud United Nations’ Security Council Resolution Number 1970 and Resolution Number 1973 adopted this year. Yet we also believe the UN should be doing far more to address the protection of China’s civilian population from continuing violations of Chinese citizens’ human rights.

We believe that the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants on Human Rights and other relevant international human rights instruments require you, the Secretary-General, to uphold the values of the UN, even at the risk of challenging Member States.

We strongly urge you to bring to the attention of the UN Security Council the past and current atrocities committed by China’s Communist dictators, which have imposed a serious and growing threat to international peace and security. It is imperative that the Security Council openly and publicly address China’s inhumane treatment of its own people by passing a resolution requiring that all Member States:

demand an immediate end to the gross and systematic violation of human rights in China;

take necessary measures to prevent the entry into or transit through their territories of individuals who are responsible for the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or for other gross and systematic violations of human rights in China;

freeze all funds, other financial assets and economic resources which are on their territories, which are owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the individuals responsible for the Tiananmen Square Massacre or for other gross and systematic violations of human rights in China;

refer the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the recent crimes against the Chinese citizens, to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; the Council shall provide information regarding these crimes against humanity to the Prosecutor to initiate investigations proprio motu.

Should China use its UN prerogatives to prevent the UN Security Council from adopting a well-defined resolution, we strongly urge UN Members to call an emergency special session of the General Assembly to adopt a resolution (including the above-mentioned provisions) to hold China accountable for its gross human rights violations and for its failure to abide by its international treaty obligations.

Additionally, the General Assembly resolution must call on the Chinese government to fully respect its human rights obligations and allow credible and independent investigations of all allegations of human rights violations, including the Tiananmen Square Massacre.  It must also request the Secretary-General to submit an interim report assessing the situation of China’s human rights abuses to the Human Rights Council at its next session and to encourage the UN Human Rights Council to establish a special monitoring and reporting mechanism on China’s inhumane treatment of its people.

Failure to act now against the Chinese regime will not only encourage that dictatorship to continue its crimes against the Chinese people, but also bolster the remaining handful of dictators in the world who shield themselves behind the “Chinese model” to justify continual repression and slaughter of their own people. Inaction on the regime only makes a laughingstock out of the UN human rights proclamations, and presents a dire threat to international peace and security.

Yours sincerely,

Signed by

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