Challenges for Xi Jinping in Taiwan: Lessons for human rights

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the Czech Parliament adopted a resolution last week condemning the Chinese government's manipulation of a key United Nations resolution on Taiwan. Similar initiatives in the parliaments of Australia, The NetherlandsTHE European Union, Canadaand the United Kingdom In previous months, he denounced Beijing's long-running campaign to prevent Taiwan's democratic government from participating in UN activities. Governments eager to take on this challenge would also have to confront a strikingly similar threat that Beijing poses to the UN human rights system.

At a time of global decline in democracy and human rights, these efforts may seem niche or quixotic. But the fact that democracies defend each other, notably through their own national institutions and not only in matters of foreign policy, demonstrates a commitment in principle. Few issues matter as much to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping as regaining control of Taiwan, and his regime is lashing out at other governments that take softer stances on the issue. But these six democracies recognized that Xi's posture threatened them and the UN, one of the main international institutions on which they rely, creating considerable diplomatic momentum for an unimaginable position in early 2024.

Parliamentary efforts are based on revolutionary report earlier this year by academics Bonnie S. Glaser and Jacques deLisle for the US German Marshall Fund, exposing the PRC's distortion of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to assert its claims over Taiwan. It details Beijing's decades-long effort to launder its sovereignty claims through the United Nations.

But the detailed policy pathologies – and proposed recommendations – could also apply to Beijing's efforts to undermine human rights at the world's flagship body. The similarities cannot be a coincidence: flawed legal assumptions (as Glaser and deLisle say), decades of pressure, diplomatic capitulations, and weak responses from democracies perfectly encapsulate how Xi seeks to neutralize China's initiatives. the UN on human rights.

Reviewing five decades of diplomatic wrangling, Glaser and deLisle reveal Beijing's strenuous efforts to present the 1971 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 as proof of the legality and international support for their position, despite the fact that the text of 2758 does not reflect these ideas at all. The resolution simply transferred China's official representation at the UN to authorities in Beijing instead of those in Taiwan, and it did not address Taiwan's status within the body. But that hasn't stopped the Chinese government from incorporating the resolution into its alternative version of history, mixing it with an emphasis on the one-China policy, through which Beijing asserts its control over Taiwan – and l effectively excluded from the UN. weak: like Xi threat take Taiwan by forcedebates and positions taken at the United Nations could be decisive in shaping international responses.

Parallels on human rights

Three tactics by the Chinese government and a failing by democracies regarding Resolution 2758 have clear human rights parallels. China's first tactic: selective and distorted legal interpretations. When UN human rights bodies are confronted with critical evidence of Chinese government violations, including the August 2022 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report concluding that the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs Chinese authorities may constitute a crimes against humanityBeijing declared these positions are slander and lies. Beijing likes to suggest that human rights belong to the Chinese featuresmeaning the Chinese government will play by its own rules, not the human rights pacts it has freely joined. And through slow but very corrosive challenges to standardslike working against country-specific investigations or removing the pursuit of liability Human Rights Councils mandateBeijing seeks to change practice when he fails to rewrite the law.

Glaser and deLisle detail the diplomatic pressure deployed by Beijing regarding Resolution 2758 on Taiwan, as well as a pattern of misinterpretation, acquiescence and misunderstanding by UN officials. Here too, the human rights parallels are worryingly strong, says Secretary-General Antnio Guterres parrot Xi praising Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative for undermining human rights, High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle says Bachelet and Volker Turkish engaging Beijing largely on its terms, with Beijing landing another mandate on the Human Rights Council although once again at the top of the list of governments persecute human rights defenders who attempt to work with the UN human rights system. Beijing is not only using its economic and political influence to get other governments to vote as it wishes in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly on human rights issues, but it is threatens and harasses UN human rights experts, obstructs access for an independent and critical civil society, and seeks to create new roles within the human rights system that it can control.

Potential for coordinated action

For decades, democracies have failed to commit sufficient resources faced with these challenges, missed opportunities for coordination and imposed few or no dissuasive consequences. This trend has emboldened Beijing in its efforts to exclude Taiwan from and weaken human rights mechanisms within the United Nations system. But innovative new parliamentary initiatives on Resolution 2758 show critical signs of at least some members of the international community responding with a coordinated, global, pro-democracy force.

Similar – and parallel – efforts are urgently needed to counter Beijing's threats to the UN's human rights architecture. Democracies should invest far greater, longer-term resources and coordination to counter the rights-eroding conduct of Beijing and its allies. For example, democracies could systematically emphasize the universality of international human rights law and demonstrate their seriousness by adhering to all major international human rights instruments (the United States, for example, have signed but not ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities). ; Japan has not joined the Genocide Convention). They should not miss an opportunity to explain that Xi's hostility toward UN human rights mechanisms poses a threat not only to more than a billion people in China, but also for people around the world.

Democracies can show they are serious about confronting Beijing's threats to the UN human rights system when those bodies are politically empowered to investigate Xi's human rights crimes and to refute his claims that the UN supports Beijing's one-China policy. Let's imagine reversing the initial dispute that led to Resolution 2758 on Taiwan to show the resilience of the UN human rights system: rather than continuing to allow Xi's human rights-violating government to run for and serve on the Human Rights Council, consider giving rights-respecting Taiwan the power to do so.

IMAGE: The head of China's mission to the UN in Geneva, Chen Xu (CR), looks at his watch ahead of the review of China's human rights record by the Human Rights Council UN man in Geneva, January 23, 2024. A crackdown on civil liberties, crackdown in Xinjiang and Hong Kong's draconian national security law are among the concerns expected to be raised in a UN review of the balance sheet of China in terms of rights. (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)