China should ratify a UN treaty on political rights and make progress on human rights to improve European public support for lifting a 16-year-old arms embargo, a senior EU official said yesterday.
Beijing is lobbying the 25-member European Union to lift the arms ban imposed after its 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. But Washington opposes such a step, and EU foreign ministers failed to agree at a key meeting last month on ending the embargo.
"We need to help persuade ... our European Parliament that China is making concrete steps to improve human rights," said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. "It's important that China assists us to bring about the right climate."
Ferrero-Waldner was in Beijing with an EU delegation for talks with China's foreign minister and othes. She said they would cover the arms embargo, human rights, Beijing's relations with Taiwan and an EU investigation into surging Chinese textile imports. EU officials have cited Beijing's refusal to ratify the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as one reason for extending the arms ban.
"The reality is, they should go for ratification," Ferrero-Waldner said.
She said the EU wasn't directly tying the lifting of the ban to human rights, but said progress would help to create an "overall climate" for ending it. Ferrero-Waldner said China's newly enacted anti-secession law, which is aimed at curbing independence activists in Taiwan -- an island Beijing claims as its territory -- also hurt sentiment in favor of lifting the arms embargo.
Noting People First Party Chairman James Soong's trip (
EU and Chinese officials will discuss the EU investigation into China's textile imports, which has alarmed Beijing. She said the EU wants to reach a settlement without triggering protective tariffs allowed by the WTO. The EU launched the investigation last month into nine types of Chinese-made clothing and textiles whose imports have jumped by up to 534 percent since a worldwide quota system ended on Jan. 1.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS