China pledges more robust human rights efforts

Beijing - The Chinese government on Monday publicized its second national plan for human rights protection, pledging much more comprehensive and goal-orientated measures than the first plan issued in 2009, as public awareness of human rights have rose in recent years.

China first included an article "the State respects and preserves human rights" in its Constitution amended in 2004, marking a milestone in China's human rights development. The legal approach was underpinned by its first action plan for the period 2009-2010, which was criticized by some as too general and focused much on regional issues, including the reconstruction in earthquake-hit Wenchuan. In comparison, the latest plan for 2012–2015 listed more specific goals and targeted the new challenges amid China’s massive urbanization process.

Emphasis on rights to subsistence and development

While emphasizing the country is a developing country fraught with unbalanced development, the plan changes nothing of its long-held principle - "prioritize people's rights to subsistence and development” in the next three years.

As part of new measures to safeguard the right to work, the government requires the minimum wage to be increased by over 13 percent annually and vows to implement the Law on the Prevention and Control of Occupational Diseases, modified in 2011. The government has implemented a series of measures to cool down rocketing house prices, and it promises to extend the coverage of affordable housing across the country to 20 percent by 2015 in the new plan, a goal not mentioned in the first.

Public health issues like food and drinking water safety have been of major concern in the rapidly changing Chinese society. The new action plan tightens punishment against law-breakers than the previous. The government aims to increase the average life expectancy to 74.5 years by 2015, while the goal was modestly set at 73 years in 2010. China is estimated to have 16 million people suffering from schizophrenia and other severe mental diseases. To address this growing challenge, the plan says a law on mental health will be formulated before 2015 as the government will also start studies for the enactment of a law on basic medical and health care.

Educational, cultural and environmental rights are expected to be better guaranteed under the plan. It highlights the importance to allocate more educational resources to central and western regions and ethnic-minority areas while the previous plan touched more general issues like the nine-year compulsory education. More noticeably, the human rights protection plan includes measures to accelerate Internet access speed and popularity, attempting to enable over 45 percent of China's population to be connected to the Internet by 2015, up from the 38.3 percent in 2012. Emerging threats like heavy metal pollution, radioactive waste, and particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers will also be closely monitored and tackled by the environmental watchdog.

Enhanced civil and political rights

With the goals more qualitative and specific in articulating measures to protect the economic, social and cultural rights, this new plan shows an encouraging development in respecting the civil and political rights too.

The first plan focused on banning diverse rights violations, such as torture or extrajudicial violence, while the new plan goes further to positive obligations. The government will enforce "preventive measures" against illegal methods of collecting evidence, and "facilitate" the work of lawyers during criminal proceedings. According to the plan, the rights and humane treatment of inmates should be ensured, prolonged detentions prevented, and the system of physical examination for detainees strictly implemented. Sound and video recording as well as video surveillance systems will used over the whole course of law enforcement. The plan also promises to improve the system of community-based correction.

Freedom of religious beliefs will continue to be protected according to law, but also with new initiatives. For a Muslim's pilgrimage to Mecca, the government will improve the organization and management for a better service. The Buddhist Academy of China and the China Islamic Institute will get governmental financial support for their expansion.

Another obvious improvement is expected to the right to expression. The first plan emphasized, quite narrowly, on the institutional protection for news media, but the new one touched more the individual level, solemnly proclaiming that "citizens' freedom of speech and right to expression are protected." It also includes a new article that workers' congress should have more say in the making and revision of labor rules and regulations in enterprises.

The measures to protect ethnic diversity become more practical while trying to balance between equality and positive discrimination. The state guarantees that ethnic minorities enjoy "equal rights to public services." Favorable policies and special programs will be implemented to promote the socio-economic development of autonomous regions like the Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Environment, culture, traditional sports, and languages are among those to be further protected in ethnic-minority regions.

Alarmed by the school bus accidents, such as the one that killed 21 in Northwest China's Gansu province in November 2011, the plan vows to make it a priority to ensure school bus and campus safety. It also urges the elimination of discrimination against girls, expands children’s welfare, particularly for disadvantaged groups, including AIDS-affected.

Long way to go

Undoubtedly, the protection of human rights involves legal, political, economic, cultural approaches and educational efforts to foster the public awareness of their legal rights. For the human rights education, the first plan focused on offering courses at schools and universities, which is not wrong, but in the new plan civil servants rank top in receiving human rights education and training. And more interestingly, China will encourage and promote the corporate cultures that “honor and protect human rights.”

For a country with more than 1.3 billion people, unbalanced economic growth in the costal areas and inland, and diverse culture and traditions, people can never overestimate the difficulties of human rights protection in China. Any perfect textbook theories, good-will UN conventions, radical NGO appeals, or legally-binding state polices have to consider the specific, constantly changing contexts on the ground to address the challenges. Human rights per se are developing in both forms and contents, requiring systemic and integrated efforts. So the National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2012-2015) is almost certainly impossible to provide perfect answers once and for all. China admits that it has a long way to go before it attains the lofty goal of full enjoyment of human rights. But we have good reasons to believe that once we start the way there’s nothing can make us stop or retreat.