OTTAWA—As the spotlight on China becomes ever brighter in the run-up to the summer Olympics, human rights for Chinese citizens haven't improved, concludes a panel of China experts.
At a luncheon forum Wednesday on Parliament Hill, speakers said that not only have human rights abuses not improved ahead of the Olympics as Beijing promised, they have actually become worse in many ways.
"To host an Olympiad while escalating the persecution of communities and individuals among your own population is irreconcilable with the modern Olympic Charter," said Hon. David Kilgour, former Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific and international human rights advocate.
Clive Ansley, chair of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong and China Country Monitor for Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada, talked about the "derelict media" remaining silent on the persecution of Falun Gong.
"Over the last 9 years the most barbaric atrocity in modern history has been going on systematically in China and it has provoked an absolutely thunderous silence on the part of our media and most of our North American politicians," said Ansley.
International human rights lawyer David Matas focused on Bloody Harvest, a report he co-authored with Kilgour on the illicit harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners' organs in China. Since an previous report in 2006, the authors have identified numerous new forms of proof that large-scale organ theft is taking place. Matas said that China is now focusing more on selling these organs to its citizens rather than to transplant tourists, as was the case until recently.
Guo Guoting, a Chinese national who was jailed twice in China for defending peoples' rights, explained that lawyers, authors, and journalists are heavily persecuted in China.
Guoting was one of only two human rights lawyers in all of China in 2003. He was also the first lawyer in China to represent a Falun Gong practitioner, for which he lost his job and was imprisoned for two and one-half years.
"If a human rights lawyer in China can't even protect himself, how can ordinary people be protected by the law? There are no human rights in China."
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