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An Arsenal of Human Rights
Oral Remarks
to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China John
Kamm Executive Director The
Dui Hua Foundation April
11, 2002 My
Chairman, Mr. Co-Chairman, distinguished members of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China: I
was one of the first people to call for the establishment of a
Congressional-Executive body, modeled on Congress’ Helsinki
Commission, to investigate and document and struggle against violations
of human rights in China. Now that this Commission is established, the time has come to
fulfill the promise for which it was created. This
Commission should make securing the release of political and religious
detainees from Chinese prisons its highest priority, the measure against
which it is judged. This
work is not only about saving a few lives – though one should make no
apology when such a result is achieved.
It is about bringing respect for human rights and rule of law to
China. The dichotomy that some draw between doing humanitarian work
and doing human rights work is a false dichotomy. Who
are the people whose freedom we seek?
They are labor organizers like Yao Fuxin, entrepreneurs like
Rebiya Kadeer, clergy like Bishop Su Zhimin, journalists like Jiang
Weiping, Tibetan activists like Ngawang Oezer and democracy leaders like
Xu Wenli. They are the people who will someday change China, but whose
ability to do so now is constrained by their being locked away in
Chinese prisons. Free them,
and change China. There
are thousands of individuals jailed for political and religious reasons
whose names we do not know. My
foundation searches for their names in bookstores and libraries around
the world. We have found
2,000 of them in three years of research.
How is it possible that their names have been accessible to China
scholars and human rights activists for so many years and no one has
bothered to look for them and write them down?
This Commission should join the effort to find as many of their
names as possible, and present them to the Chinese authorities at every
opportunity, remembering that the struggle of man against power is the
struggle of memory against forgetting, and that truth crushed to earth
will rise again. Prisoners
have rights. They are human
beings. Getting the Chinese
government to respect their rights to freedom from torture, to medical
care when they’re ill, to the comfort of family visits, to due process
in the hearing of appeals is fundamentally a struggle for human rights.
Using international standards and China’s own laws to win
freedom and better treatment for political prisoners is fundamentally a
struggle for rule of law. Arguing
otherwise, denigrating prisoner work as something separate and less
worthy than human rights work, or, as some have argued, something that
prolongs the life of the regime and makes it easier for it to make more
arrests, is dangerous sophistry, and I urge you to reject it. When
we press for the release of individual prisoners, we send a strong
message about our priorities. This
is a nation built on the rights of the individual, not the rights of the
collective. You can’t
talk about human rights without talking about human beings.
The spectacle of legal experts engaged in a bilateral dialogue in
which cases of violations are not discussed is one that must be avoided
at all costs. Open and
frank discussions about violations
of human rights, discussions that are based on full and accurate
information on individual prisoners, must be a condition for holding
bilateral human rights dialogues. Assistant
Secretary Lorne Craner has taken this position, and we should applaud
him for it. This
Commission should become an arsenal of human rights, arming its members
and your colleagues in Congress with lists of the names of people whose
freedom and better treatment must be the principal goal of our
country’s human rights diplomacy.
I urge you to construct and post on your website the prisoner
registry your mandate calls for, and I urge you to do it without delay.
The NGO community is ready to help. Let your calls for freedom ring in the corridors of power, in Beijing and in the provinces. Let them ring from the mountains of Tibet to the oil fields of Heilongjiang, from the villages of Sichuan to the teeming metropolis of Shanghai. Let those in prison for the simple expression of their beliefs hear freedom’s ring, and in that song the voices of those who made this country a shining city on a hill, the hope of the world. You will then fulfill the promise of this Commission, and do honor to your legacy as Americans. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions and comments.
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