Nation promotes human rights
Xi’s vision provides a solution to cope with the challenges that global governance faces, experts say
President Xi Jinping’s idea of building a community with a shared future for mankind offers Chinese wisdom and solutions in promoting fairer and more reasonable global human rights governance, experts said.
The vision — with pursuit of common progress and development at its core — represents bright prospects for human rights development, and will encourage developing countries to jointly oppose double standards in international human rights, they said.
The two-day 2019 South-South Human Rights Forum, jointly hosted by the State Council Information Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, opened in Beijing on Human Rights Day, which falls on Dec 10 every year to commemorate the day the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Lionel Vairon, CEO of CEC Consulting in Luxembourg and an expert in development strategies, said the international community should not ignore China’s progress in human rights out of an ideological misunderstanding and prejudice.
“In the future, global governance must make a choice between the policy of strong-power hegemony and the path of a community with a shared future for mankind,” he said. “The latter is the wisdom China has contributed to the world.”
Speaking in a congratulatory letter to a symposium in Beijing last year marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Xi said China will work with other countries to uphold the common values of humanity — peace, development, equality, justice, democracy and freedom, to safeguard human dignity and rights.
Meanwhile, he said, the nation stands ready to promote fairer, sounder and more inclusive global human rights governance, and to advance the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.
Huang Kunming, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, said in the keynote speech on Dec 11 that some countries, forces and politicians have grossly interfered in other countries’ domestic affairs in the name of human rights.
“This has severely damaged the course of international human rights,” Huang said.
Every country’s model and concept of human rights varies due to their differing social systems, development stages, cultural traditions and values, and no one should force his own way of thinking and standards of conduct upon others.
Huang quoted Xi as saying that there is no such thing as a one-sizefits-all global development model for human rights and called for human rights development to be promoted according to each country’s conditions and its people’s needs.
China has paved a path of human rights development that meets its own conditions and has contributed Chinese wisdom to the world, he said.
Mao Junxiang, a professor of human rights studies at Central South University in Changsha, Hunan province, said Xi’s vision provides a solution to cope with the challenges that global governance faces amid a changing international situation, and also draws a clear picture for the development prospects of international human rights governance.
In March 2017, the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind was written into two resolutions of the United Nations
Human Rights Council. In March 2018, a resolution China proposed — Promoting Mutually Beneficial Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights — was adopted by the 37th session of the UN Human Rights Council.
Xi said it is important for the international community to respect and reflect the will of the people in developing countries in the spirit of justice, fairness, openness and inclusiveness. He made the comment in a message of congratulations on the opening of the first South-South Human Rights Forum in December 2017.
Saying human rights must and can only be promoted in light of specific national conditions and people’s needs, Xi called on developing countries to steadily raise the level of human rights protection.
Michael Njunga Mulikita, dean of the School of Social Sciences of Mulungushi University, Zambia, said the human rights narrative has been used by dominant developed countries to impose their own agenda on developing countries for political reasons.
“It’s important that global governance take into account the position of the developing countries. Otherwise, it becomes governance that is dominated by an elite group of countries at the expense of the large majority,” Mulikita said.
Vairon cited the example of the United States’ recent adoption of a law related to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, saying the law is a new step by Washington to interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs. “It has nothing to do with human rights. It suffices to look at the American double standard policy about the war in Yemen, and the treatment of Palestinians, Guantanamo, etc,” he said.