Today, on International Human Rights Day, groups will hold vigils and celebrations around the globe to mark 60 years since the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
It is a day to pause and appreciate the freedoms we have, note the progress we have made since the Martial Law-era and remember those who live or lived under oppression.
In Hong Kong on Sunday, members of Independent PEN took to the streets early, calling for the principles of the UDHR to be respected and for China to release around 50 writers known to be imprisoned because of the words they dared to air.
That is a call protesters could hardly have made in communist China without risking detention themselves. Six decades after the UDHR’s inception, the principles enshrined in it — as well as in the UN human rights conventions that Beijing has since signed — carry little or no weight with Chinese authorities.
Last week, reports emerged that China had launched another of its infamous “strike hard” campaigns, this time to renew its stranglehold on a media environment that it thinks is getting out of hand. While the campaign will apparently target the domestic media to ensure that reports do not fuel the country’s swelling social unrest, the foreign press can hardly hope for better treatment.
News of the campaign followed on the heels of two reports at the end of last month that Chinese authorities violated the lofty freedoms they promised foreign journalists during the Summer Olympics — a set of relaxed guidelines that Beijing reaffirmed after the Games ended.
On Nov. 28, a British correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was detained while covering a story about one of China’s countless underground churches — considered a scourge by Beijing despite its repeated assertions that it respects freedom of religion. Peter Ford was taken to an airport in Henan Province and sent back to Beijing immediately after being questioned for three hours, Reporters without Borders said.
Even more disturbing were reports that a Belgian TV crew were assaulted a day earlier for covering treatment of AIDS patients — also in Henan Province. The crew said they were pulled from their car, their videotapes and reporters’ notes taken and that they were beaten up.
The attack would hardly be the first on a journalist in China, where at least 10 foreign reporters were roughed up during the Olympics. It is not known how many domestic media workers might regularly meet such harassment. But the news was particularly symbolic of Beijing’s well-documented hypocrisy on matters of human rights, as it came just three days before World AIDS Day. To mark that day, Dec. 1, China held events designed to remake its notorious image as a regime that discriminates against AIDS patients and brutally represses open dialogue on the spread of the disease within its borders.
Every human being is entitled to the rights set forth in the UDHR. Unfortunately, the world remains a place where those rights must be fought for. As Taiwan again finds itself in a disquieting position in which the government must be reminded of its duties to respect rights that the nation had only recently begun to take for granted, we would do well to reflect on the harsh reality in neighboring countries and refocus our eyes on the goal.
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