UN backs Xi Jinping’s version of human rights

China has convinced the UN Human Rights Council to support President Xi Jinping’s core rights concept.

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: AP

China has convinced the UN Human Rights Council to support President Xi Jinping’s core rights concept: that it should pursue “a community of shared future for human beings”.

China’s motion was agreed by the 47-member council over the weekend, with only the US opposing and 17 countries, including Australia, Britain, Japan and Switzerland, abstaining.

It urged “mutually beneficial co-operation in the field of human rights”, stressing respect for each country’s interpretation of the concept, in strong contrast with the long-established UN aspiration of implementing universal human rights.

The co-sponsors of China’s motion included Syria, Cambodia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Egypt, Myanmar, Burundi and Eritrea.

Australia stated its concern, arguing that the motion lacked balance “and focuses only on relations between states instead of individual rights”.

The Chinese focus is strongly backed by the “Like-Minded Group” of 52 countries — co-ordinated by Russia, China and Egypt — that oppose efforts by the US, Europe and other liberal democracies to strengthen international oversight of rights violations. This group stresses the importance of its members’ sovereignty and their right to determine their own forms of governance.

China had sought its motion to be adopted by consensus, but the US insisted on a vote. US representative Jason Mack said: “It is clear that China is attempting through this resolution to weaken the UN human rights system and the norms underpinning it … in order to benefit autocratic states.”

Yu Jianhua, China’s representative, said the words of the motion, used prominently in speeches on global governance by Mr Xi, reflect “the very purpose of the United Nations”.

China’s People’s Daily newspaper welcomed the motion’s adoption, saying it represented “a major shift in the global human rights conversation”.

China has argued consistently that economic rights should be elevated to the status of civil and political rights, with closer attention paid to the rights of countries to develop, and to follow their own path in doing so.

Amr Essam, an Egyptian diplomat to the UN in Geneva, said the LMG members were not required to agree on all issues, but to share information, deliver explanations and co-ordinate voting patterns in an “ambitious and agile” way.

Miloon Kothari, a former special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council, wrote in The Diplomat that “China has in recent years adopted a vocal and assertive role in a range of international spaces, and has put significant resources into two pillars of the UN — peace and security development.”

Mr Kothari said China was building “a third pillar, of human rights with a heavy-handed focus on dialogue and consensus, and a reduction on transparency and accountability”.

He said the “co-operation” that the resolution presents “can become an escape route for governments which prefer an absence of scrutiny for their questionable practices, and go to great lengths at home and abroad to avoid it”.

When the “shared future” motion was approved, six UN human rights experts — including Philip Alston, the world body’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights — voiced concern about the health of Chinese human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong, who has been jailed for inciting “subversion of state power”.

Mr Jiang’s arrest is part of a crackdown on lawyers and other human rights defenders and activists that has been under way for almost three years, with hundreds arrested and jailed.