A Quote by Joshua Wong
Countries often prioritise economic interests over human rights - hence all the kowtowing to China.
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There's a dilemma over how to balance concrete economic interests with critical opinions on the state of human rights. It's the human rights that suffer, and that's a great price to pay.
In the new century, we should continue to work together to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the vast number of developing countries including China and India and promote the establishment of a just and equitable new international political and economic order.
The BRIC countries - Brazil, India, China, Turkey, South Africa, Indonesia even, and Russia - are now new actors. Over the last eight years, China multiplied by seven its economic presence and penetration in the Middle East. And if this happens on economic terms and there is a shift towards the East, the relationship between these countries and Israel is completely different from the United States. And it means that the challenges are going to be different, because China is not supporting Israel the way the U.S. are supporting Israel.
Additionally, any Human Rights Council reform that allows countries with despicable human rights records to remain as members, such as China and Saudi Arabia, is not real reform.
The human rights record within China seems to rise and fall over time, but it's very clear that in the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and since then, there's been a greater intolerance of dissent and the human rights record of China has been going in the wrong direction.
Often Americans have heard Donald Trump be very hard on China. But that's not how it's heard over there. In China, his message is being interpreted as the sound of an exhausted America, an America that is seeking to withdraw from its commitments to NATO, to holding up, for instance, human rights around the world.
Human rights in China should absolutely play a role in broader U.S. policy toward China. When we look the other way on fundamental issues of human rights, we are also responsible.
China is a developing country with a huge population, and also a developing country in a crucial stage of reform. In this context, China still faces many challenges in economic and social development. And a lot still needs to be done in China, in terms of human rights.
Just as it wouldn't be right to only to have an economic dialogue with China, equally you shouldn't restrict your dialogue solely to issues around, say, human rights. You can raise all those issues, and that is what reflects a mature discussion. So I don't think essentially we have to choose between being partners in China's economic development and being proud defenders of British values.
China is the big economic engine in Asia, so what happens is, as China growth expands, these countries in the periphery of China, whether it be Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, they end up growing with China because they become big exporters.
It is a great problem for the true international agenda of human rights that the United States, uniquely among industrialised countries, has not ratified three main instruments, has not ratified the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and we could have so much richer a debate and dialogue on international human rights standards if the superpower would sign up to the agenda.
Japan and China are isolated and without intercourse with other countries; hence the President directed me to attend to or watch the state of affairs in China also.
One of the problems that we have in the human rights community is that special interests often forget the interests of other victims, and there's competition among victims expressions that are unnecessary.
The term 'human rights' has been too often associated with conditionality, and with concerns of developing countries that in order to benefit from open trade they would be required to implement immediately labour and environmental standards of a comparable level to those applied in industrialised countries. At the same time, debates about the primacy of trade as against human rights legal codes have contributed to maintaining the unfortunate impression that the two bodies of law are pursuing incompatible aims.
Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.
That's one of the things that I'm going to talk about, is the need for the Human Rights Council to actually deal with human rights. We've got countries on the Human Rights Council right now like Venezuela and Cuba.
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