Rights group: China must stop pressuring advocates at UN

China has tried to intimidate, blacklist and squelch the voices of rights advocates who operate within the UN system, Human Rights Watch said in a report today, calling on Beijing to stop such pressure and urging UN agencies to resist.
Presenting the report , HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said that China's influence and crackdown on civil society at home "make it a model of bad faith that challenges the integrity of the UN rights system."
The New York-based group's report is based on interviews with 55 people including UN officials, diplomats and civil society representatives between May 2016 and March, and takes aim at a powerful, rising country with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the Chinese government is committed to promoting and protecting human rights, and accused Human Rights Watch of being prejudiced against China.
"We urge the relevant organisation to remove its tinted lenses and view China's human rights development and its contribution to the international rights cause in an unbiased and objective way, and stop its groundless accusations against China," Geng told reporters at a regular briefing.
The report said some UN officials have pushed back at "improper Chinese pressure" at times, while they "have capitulated" at others.

It pointed to detention, travel restrictions and reprisals faced by Chinese activists, as well as efforts to hinder supporters of the Dalai Lama when he travels even within the vicinity of UN venues.

In one instance, the group said, UN officials sent home some of the 3,000 staffers at the UN's Geneva campus during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Switzerland in January, and barred NGOs from attending his speech there.
The UN office in Geneva, in a statement, said it "takes very seriously" the report's comments, insisting that it works to allow UN human rights bodies "to carry out their work in a conducive environment free from interference of any kind."
As for the Xi visit on January 18, the UN building in Geneva "was indeed closed to visitors for security reasons, in accordance with security rules applicable to high-level visits." It said "staff had been invited to work from home in order to facilitate security arrangements for such a high- level event."

The report, in essence, pieces together individual incidents into a broader whole to suggest that China is systematically thwarting efforts to monitor and protect human rights not just in China but abroad, too.
It cites examples of China failing to ratify language on protection of individuals, working to slash funding for human rights officers in UN peacekeeping missions and refusing to affirm civil society's role in a 2015 resolution at the UN Human Rights Council on public health.
"Taken individually, many of China's actions against NGOs might be viewed as an annoyance or an irritant," the report says. "But taken together, they amount to what appears to be a systematic attempt to subvert the ability of the UN human rights system to confront abuses in China and beyond.