Opening Remarks at Forum 2000 Panel: “China: Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century Digital Surveillance State”
Prague, Czech Republic
By: Jianli Yang
October 15, 2019
China’s human rights situation is dire, as bad as anyone can imagine. In my opening remarks, I won’t talk about it but will be ready to answer any questions regarding it later.
Instead, I want to raise a question and put forth a rough idea on how to answer the question.
I assume we all want to do something to help improve China’s human rights situation if we can. But the question is: How much money is an individual, a business, or a country willing to or able to lose for standing up to China’s authoritarian might?
It is probably too much to ask Norwegian fisherman—or Canadian farmers or Czech small businesspeople—to sacrifice their livelihoods on the altar of human rights.
There is a limit. We must be practically idealistic.
When the US left the UN Human Rights Council, I was interviewed by the media about whether it was a good idea, a sensible move. My answer was, yes, if the US had an alternative plan, and no, if not. I have no idea whether the US has one even today. The question we are seeking to answer is what kind of alternative we advocate for.
What has been in my mind is a human rights treaty organization of democracies, a Human Rights NATO if you will, that engages in both collective confrontation and collective defense on human rights issues.
- Collective confrontation has three levels:
- Each signatory country passes a Human Rights Act linking human rights with all fields of diplomatic ties with dictatorships—regular assessments and executive reports to Parliament or Congress, etc.
- Collectively confront human rights violating countries for human rights issues on various world platforms.
- Come up with united measures of punishment addressing individual human rights violating cases—economic sanctions, boycotting cultural events (exchanges, Games, etc.), Magnitsky sanctions, and so on and so forth.
- Collective defense:
- This will help break the collective action dilemma all the democracies have been so far trapped in. It is very important for everyone, especially smaller ones. In the past, China, for example, has retaliated or threatened to retaliate against countries that confronted it for its human rights abuses.
- So, the treaty must be such that, if one member of the treaty organization is retaliated against economically by an undemocratic country for standing up for democratic principles, all other democracies in the treaty agree to come to its defense, helping ease its economic pain.
There are a lot of talks of democracy being on recess. If it is true, one of the major reasons is that democratic values routinely give way to economic interests. The Human Rights “NATO” will help turn around that trend; it preserves democratic values while protecting economic interests of democracies.