Transcript
JOHN KAMM: It's a special pleasure to be here at the Brookings Institution this afternoon, at the kind invitation of Richard Bush. Richard and I go back nearly 15 years, when he helped Congressman Steve Solarz run the House Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Asia. Richard helped arrange some of the first hearings on China's Most Favored Nation trading status and the country's human rights record. I was invited to testify in my capacity as President of the American Chamber of Commerce at hearings held on May 15 and 16, 1990, and there I made a pledge to use whatever relationships and goodwill I enjoyed in Beijing to lobby the Chinese government to release prisoners of conscience. All I have been doing since then is trying to fulfill this promise, made at a hearing to which I was invited by Richard Bush, someone who cares deeply about human rights, and who has given me much encouragement and support over many years. Thank you, Richard.
Since the early 1990s, when I was beginning my human rights work, the Chinese government has initiated bilateral human rights exchanges with about a dozen countries. There have been 19 rounds of the Sino-EU dialogue on human rights. The last session, which took place a few weeks ago, included a three-day visit by the EU Troika to Tibet and follow-up discussions on China's ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the subject of a joint EU-China seminar held in Beijing in July. The United Kingdom has held 12 rounds of its human rights dialogue with China (the most recent in London in May), and the Swiss have held seven. The latest round of the Sino-Norwegian Dialogue on Human Rights and the Rule of Law—the eighth—took place in Beijing in June. Both the Swiss and the Norwegians have visited the Ministry of Justice's training center for prison guards in Baoding, Hebei Province, and training programs between the countries' respective prison services and China's are being considered.
Beijing suspended the official dialogue between the US and China on March 23 in response to the introduction by the US of a country resolution on China at the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. The last round of the Sino-US dialogue on human rights took place in Washington in November 2002. China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs says that it was the 13th round of talks dating back to the early 1990s; no one at the State Department is keeping score. Representatives of the two governments held expert talks on the fate of China's counterrevolutionaries in November 2003 and March 2004, but there has been no formal round of the dialogue for nearly two years.
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