Jessie Lucas
November 13th
5:35 PM
President Obama needs to press upon China the importance of upholding human rights next week when he makes his first official visit there. Thousands of human rights activists as well as lawyers for the same cause are facing detention, harassment, imprisonment, and unfair trials. China also continues to execute more people than the entire world combined. The “re-education through labour” detention system has the ability to lock people away for up to four years without trial. Torture of prisoners by law enforcement is incredibly common and many prisoners die while in custody. Human rights lawyers are treated increasing badly. They are harassed, intimidated, assaulted, abducted, placed under surveillance and house arrest, and face criminal charges. Some even “disappear”. Some of the things that China needs to do include abolishing the “re-education through labour” system, investigate the Tiananmen Square crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrators, allowing freedom of worship, stop repressing and instead respect those who have different ethnic, cultural and religious identities, and release those who have been wrongfully imprisoned.
I believe that China definitely needs to take these important steps to ensure human rights for all its people. They did adopt a human rights plan after they hosted the Olympic Games, however they have not made a significant effort to apply these new ideals. I’m not sure why it’s being put on President Obama to make China behave. To me it seems that the United Nations should be in charge of taking care of that. However I do agree that leaders of other countries should help get China to do what it needs to do in order to bring rights to the people in that country. I’m not aware of the entire situation but if it’s just Obama that they are trying to get to convince China it needs to change than I doubt that will go very far compared to if many nations’ leaders got together to do it.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/obama-must-press-china-uphold-human-rights-20091113
1 comment:
I completely agree that the United Nations should be in charge of dealing with this. As a liberal and honestly just as a person who wants to help anyone out I wish America could help with this issue. but at the moment we need to help ourselves before we help anyone else.
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