Just in time to preemptively address the inevitable international remembrance of the 20-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese State Council released its “Human Rights Action Plan” for the next two years on Monday. Unfortunately, the “plan” contains very few concrete actions to be taken that will actually improve civil liberties.
The document primarily promises a stronger commitment to existing laws already on the books – laws that many human rights groups claim are often overlooked or suppressed.
Further, no reforms are made to the country’s one-party system, the plan does not end or even phase out the practice of sending individuals to “re-education” prison camps without trial, and the unregistered prisons set up for political dissidents are not even mentioned.
The paper promises a “right of urban and rural residents to a basic standard of living,” and that unemployment will remain below 5%. The Chinese government appears far more interested in keeping up appearances than in putting people first.
China has made some real progress on human rights since that bloody day in Tiananmen Square, but many local and provincial government agencies are slow to change their ways. The plan does call for solid action to reduce the occurrence of torture, such as requiring interrogation rooms to have some physical separation to distance interrogators from a suspect, but even such simple and effective steps will take years to implement nationwide.
About a week ago, Sun Wenguang, a 75-year-old retired professor who has been imprisoned multiple times in his life for expressing his political opinions and who was placed under 24-hour surveillance in the days prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was brutally beaten by 5 unidentified men “in broad daylight and clear view of the police,” according to Human Rights in China.
On December 10, 2008 - over 300 Chinese intellectuals and human rights advocates signed Charter 08, echoing many of the demands of the Tiananmen Square protesters. 20 years after the “June Fourth Incident,” the world is still waiting…
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