Brussels, 17/07/2000 (Agence Europe) - The NGO Human Rights Watch has addressed an open letter to European Foreign Ministers proposing a new method of dialogue with China on human rights. Human Rights Watch is "deeply concerned that the EU-China bilateral dialogue has become a largely rhetorical shell, lacking in accountability, transparency and clear benchmarks for progress". Human Rights Watch thus proposes setting precise goals in the dialogue on human rights and to broach priority issues within working groups, including Chinese and European parliamentarians.
Noting that the EU has already observed a lack of progress in the bi-annual dialogue on human rights, rekindled in 1995, HRW proposes that the EU adopt an approach based on four pillars: (1) define in advance of the next round of dialogue meetings on the human rights issues of most concern to the EU and make these public; (2) announce clear benchmarks for measuring progress and how these will be evaluated, publishing an annual progress report that should be "issued in time for the December debate by the European Parliament"; (3) publish in advance a timetable for reaching the stated benchmarks (longer for a reform of the laws on security and shorter, for example, to avoid the use of repressive laws or for presenting statistics on death sentences); (4) use the European Parliament's report and debate as basis for defining the European stance at the annual March session of the UN's Human Rights Commission.
Human Rights Watch, moreover, proposes creating five working parties within the EU/China dialogue on priority subjects: - prompt ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; - the death penalty; - access by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to Gendun Choekyi Nyima, who disappeared with his family, having been recognised as the 11th Panchen Lama; - review of the sentences of all those imprisoned for so-called counter-revolutionary crimes; - abolition of all forms of administrative detention.
The NGO considers that it would be useful to have European parliamentarians and delegates from the Chinese National Congress, as well as legal experts, experts in labour law and European and Chinese diplomats participate in some working groups.