By Catherine Armitage,
China correspondent
AUSTRALIA’S annual human rights talk with China, just completed, is an “absurdity” which not only fails to deliver results but helps China avoid international criticism of its human rights record, according to a leading Australian academic.
“It is a way of avoiding the real issues of human rights with China, and of assisting China to avoid the major multilateral forums where it is subject to criticism or pressure,” said Ann Kent, a senior research fellow at the Centre for International and Public Law at the Australian National University.
A delegation led by Geoff Raby, deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and including Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission president John von Doussa, returned from a visit to China earlier this week.
Dr Kent said Australia was “parcelling up (the human rights dialogue) in a form that is acceptable to the Chinese” so it could protect trade interests and keep “getting on with China”.
A senior DFAT member of the delegation insisted “practical and concrete outcomes” were being achieved through an aid program of “technical co-operation” funded at $1.4 million for the coming year. The program has, for example, trained Chinese judges and prison officers on human rights issues and held workshops for Chinese women on domestic violence.
Justice von Doussa also defended the program.
“What do you want, nothing at all?” he asked. He said the “megaphone diplomacy” of the past had failed. But recent legal reforms in China, for example, appeared to incorporate things “introduced to them by the Australian system”, such as a new program of community service sentencing for juvenile offenders.
This year, for the first time, the delegation was allowed to visit Tibet, where Chinese oppression of the Tibetan ethnic minority has long provoked international condemnation.
But the visit demonstrated that the grassroots human rights education programs Australia sought for Tibet were still a long way off, according to Bill Kennedy, director of international programs for HREOC and a member of the delegation.
“There is a level of suspicion about our motives and we don’t yet have the track record or credibility with the Tibetan authorities that we have built with the authorities (at the central government level),” Mr Kennedy said.
