APPENDIX 3
Memorandum from the Society for the Protection
of Unborn Children (SPUC)
1. The Society for the Protection of Unborn
Children (SPUC) is a lobbying and educational membership organisation,
founded in London in 1967 to defend human life from conception
to natural death. SPUC has been invited by parliamentary committees
to submit evidence on a range of topics.
2. SPUC has been concerned about the human
rights abuses which have occurred as a result of China's population
control programme (the "one-child policy") since the
policy's inception.
3. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs
Committee report on the Human Rights Annual Report 2001 stated
at paragraph 28:
"The Human Rights Annual Report comments
at some length, and rightly so, on abuses of human rights in China,
including restrictions on the exercise of freedom of religion
and belief. On page 17 of the Annual Report the Government sets
out ten objectives of a high-level critical dialogue on human
rights issues between China and the United Kingdom and its EU
partners, objectives with which we agree. There is, however, one
omission. We suggest that the human rights abuses which have occurred
as a result of China's population control programme29—"coercive
fertility control", as described by the Secretary of State
for International Development30—should also appear as a
matter to be addressed in this list of objectives, and should
be mentioned in future Human Rights Annual Reports." [1]
4. Footnote 29 is to SPUCs memorandum to
the Committee of 28 January 2002.
5. We thank the Committee for accepting
and acting on our concerns in this regard.
6. In the 2002 Human Rights Annual Report,
a box on the one-child policy has been included in Chapter 1.17
China (page 37)[2].
We welcome this inclusion. However, there is no mention of the
one-child policy in the list of the government's objectives of
its human rights dialogue with China, despite the Committee's
suggestion that it should appear in this list.
7. Furthermore, the box on the one-child
policy is seriously erroneous and woefully inadequate. I will
address these in the order in which they appear.
". . . the rapid growth of [Chinas] population
and the consequent strain on food supplies, jobs and the environment".
8. This statement is based on false premises.
China's food output per person has increased by more than 40%
since the one-child policy was implemented in 1979, which is due
not to population control, but to government reform of agricultural
policies. China has more arable land per person than many other
Asian countries. A 2001 report by the United Nations Population
Division states: "Even though population increased more rapidly
during the twentieth century than ever before, economic output
grew even faster, owing to the accelerating tempo of technological
progress while world population increased close to 4 times, world
real gross domestic product increased 20 to 40 times, allowing
the world to not only sustain a four-fold population increase,
but also to do so at vastly higher standards of living."
The same report also states: "In general, population growth
appears to be much less important as a driving force of [environmental]
problems than is economic growth and technology."
"We do not question China's right (or
need) to implement family planning policies, but we have emphasised
that this should be based on the International Conference on Population
and Development (ICPD) principles of free and informed parental
choice, not on coercion."
9. Any efforts to focus the Chinese government's
attention on non-coercive approaches have failed. A US State Department
delegation to China in May 2002 stated that "our team looks
upon [social compensation fees] as a coercive element that will
shortly have a new legal basis when the Law on Population and
Birth Planning goes into effect on September 1, 2002." ("Second
Finding: Coercive Elements in Practice and Law," US State
Department Delegation to China, 29 May 2002). Missing from the
new law is any reference to the ICPD principles, namely, that
couples have the right to determine the timing and spacing of
pregnancies. Article 11 of the new Chinese Law on Population and
Birth Planning calls for "detailed population control quotas"
and Article 17 states that "Citizens . . . are also duty-bound
undergo family planning as provided for in the law." According
to a report by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, China has recently
renewed its commitment to birth quotas for at least the next 20
years. ( "PRC Law on Population and Family Planning",
29 December 2001).
"We have concerns relating to the one
child policy, such as enforced sterilisation, the abortion of
female foetuses and the abandonment of female children".
10. "Concern" is insufficient
in the face of what leading feminist academic Wendy McElroy has
described as "arguably the greatest bioethical atrocity on
the globe" (Fox News Views, 24 September 2002). The "concerns"
cited seem random and partial, omitting other equally serious
human rights abuses of the one-child policy such as forced abortions
and abandonment of both male and female children, infanticide,
arbitrary detention and physical abuse of pregnant women and their
families, and the oppression of ethnic minorities.
"They are also a source of concern for
many Chinese people".
11. Again, "concern" is insufficient:
On 23 August 2002, the South China Morning Post reported
that a woman had attempted to commit suicide after a forced abortion.
Chinese nationals often apply for asylum in the United Kingdom
and the United States on the grounds of persecution under the
one-child policy. In a letter to SPUC in September 2001, Dr John
S. Aird, former China specialist at the US Bureau of the Census,
wrote: "The family planning program is extremely unpopular
with the people and must be imposed by force. But the use of forcible
measures encounters much popular resistance. For this reason,
family planning tasks have often been said to be the most difficult
under Heaven." In February 2000, a US State Department human
rights report cited "[one study which] reported that the
collection of unfair and unregulated unplanned birth-fees aroused
the sentiments of the masses". A 1999 Amnesty International
report identified "strong resentment" and "discontent
leading in some areas to incidents of violence" resulting
from enforcement of the one-child policy in the Xinjiang Uighur
Autonomous Region (XUAR). The BBC World Service reported in September
1997 that "riots have broken out near the southern city of
Gaozhou after government officials moved in to enforce the country's
one child family planning policy". In January 1995 and May
1996, the BBC reported that Chinese refugees arriving in Australia
cited coercion in family planning as one of their reasons for
leaving China.
"In recent years the number of rights
abuses associated with the one child policy appears to have declined."
12. In the above-mentioned letter to SPUC,
Dr Aird also wrote: "More extreme measures of compulsion
in local implementation are being reported. For the first time
we are hearing of torture and deaths in family planning enforcement.
A number of foreign press articles in the past four years have
declared that the Chinese government has taken steps to moderate
the enforcement of family planning rules. Some reports have stated
that the government is actively discouraging the use of coercive
measures. These reports are all in error. Family planning directives
issued by the central authorities, including the most recent (published)
central family planning policy document, dated 2 March 2000, continue
to emphasize the need to use "administrative measures"
(the Chinese euphemism for coercive tactics) to assure local compliance
with programme requirements. They also continue the practice of
setting targets, holding local party and government leaders personally
responsible for their fulfillment, and punishing those who fail.
The 2 March 2000 document explicitly calls for continuance of
the target management responsibility system and the "veto
with one vote" strategy, under which a local leader who fails
to achieve his family planning targets is judged a total failure
as an administrator regardless of his success in implementing
other central policies. It is the punitive measures under this
system that drive local officials to engage in coercion."
13. On 5 August 2001 the Sunday Telegraph
reported that Huaiji county in Guangdong province "has been
ordered to conduct 20,000 abortions and sterilisations before
the end of the year after communist family planning chiefs found
that the official one child policy was being routinely flouted
. . . Many of the terminations will have to be conducted forcibly
on peasant women to meet the quota . . . Officials said that,
as part of the drive to meet the quota, doctors had been ordered
to sterilise women as soon as they gave birth after officially
approved pregnancies."
"The UK is working to secure respect
for reproductive health rights in China through DFID funding for
the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood
Federation (IPPF). UNFPA and IPPF have been falsely accused of
supporting coercive family planning practices. These allegations
are without foundation. Both organisations strongly back the principle
that coercion has no place in family planning."
14. The US administration clearly disagrees:
On 21 July 2002, US Secretary of State Colin Powell stated in
a letter to U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd that "UNFPA's support
of, and involvement in, China's population planning activities
allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its
program of coercive abortion."
15. IPPF is also complicit in the one-child
policy's coercive practices. The China Family Planning Association
(CFPA), a state-run body responsible for ensuring the policy's
implementation, has been an IPPF member since 1983. CFPA has admitted
that it has "participated and supervised that the awarding
and punishing policies relating to family planning were properly
executed" (a 1993 CFPA report distributed at the ICPD, Cairo,
1994). IPPF itself has admitted that CFPA "volunteers sometime
collect the occasional fine when a couple breaks the birthplan
rules" (IPPF's "People" magazine, vol.16, no.1,
1989). CFPA president Song Ping exhorted in 1992: "Raise
the level of eugenics to a new height" (Xinhua news report,
20 November 1992).
16. A 1995 Overseas Development Agency (now
DfID) document China: Population Issues stated: "Critics
of this position argue that several years of UNFPA and IPPF involvement
in China has not led the Chinese to moderate their policies or
stop abuses in the implementation of policy. This is true."
"Earlier this year a cross-party group
of MPs visited China on a fact-finding mission to gather information
on China's current reproductive health policies and UNFPA's work
in China. The MPs found that in the 32 counties where the UNFPA
is active it has helped to change attitudes and give women more
control and choice over their own lives."
17. It is important to note that:
— this fact-finding mission was organized
by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development
and Reproductive Health (APPG-POPDEVRH). APPG-POPDEVRH Chairman,
Christine McCafferty, was one of the three MPs on the mission
to China. Prior to the mission, McCafferty tabled a motion in
the House of Commons calling on President Bush to approve funding
for UNFPA;
— APPG-POPDEVRH has received substantial
and recent funding from UNFPA and IPPF, as detailed in the Group's
entry in the Register of All-Party Group Interests. APPG-POPDEVRH
has also received funding from the Department for International
Development (DFID), to whom the delegation's report was to be
forwarded. The Secretary of State for International Development,
Clare Short, is an avowed supporter of UNFPA and its programme
in China, and has been for many years;
— the British delegation also found
that "citizens still have to pay a social compensation payment
if they have more than one or two children", which is "set
at a level which most families would find extremely difficult
to pay. It therefore acts as a pretty powerful incentive to conform.
This is a form of coercion." (China Mission Report by Christine
McCafferty, Edward Leigh and Norman Lamb, 2 July 2002);
— the British delegation admitted that
it was able "to observe family planning & reproductive
health practices in only two of those counties" and that
this was a "limited opportunity";
— the British delegation reported that
"both professionals and village women said that they had
not heard of abuses, either in the present or the past."
Given the high degree of coercion in China's population control
programme over a period in excess of two decades, these statements
are simply not credible. As none of the MPs spoke Chinese, translators
were assigned to the delegation. These translators, "one
a Chinese national from UNFPA and one a Swedish national from
Marie Stopes International". The delegation admitted: "It
could be claimed that interpreters, or the people spoken to, were
biased, especially when officials were present; thus making it
difficult for the team to get honest impressions from ordinary
people."
"In these 32 counties the demographic
quotas and targets have been lifted"
18. A U.S. State Department delegation was
sent to China in May 2002 investigate whether the Chinese population
control programme is fundamentally coercive and if the UNFPA supports
this programme. The delegation found that "the 32 counties
in which UNFPA is involved the population programs of the PRC
retain coercive elements in law and practice." (Letter from
Delegation to Colin Powell, 29 May 2002) The delegation found
that social compensation fees are imposed in UNFPA counties to
coerce women to undergo abortions for "out of plan"
births. For instance, in Rongchang County, Sichuan Province, where
UNFPA operates, the Deputy County Magistrate, He Guangyu, stated
that social compensation fees are as high as 8,000 yuan. In Pingba
County, Guizhou County, Ms. Ying Li, Deputy County Magistrate,
told the delegation that "social compensation fees were an
important disincentive for couples." In Sihui, Guangdong
Province, Mr. Huang Zhemin, Deputy Mayor, told the delegation
that "social compensation fees are levied to compensate the
government for the extra expenses incurred by extra children."
(memorandum of conversation between UNFPA/China Assessment Team
and Pingba Co. Dep. Magistrate, 18 May 2002; and Sihui City Deputy
Mayor, 23 May 2002; U.S. State Department Delegation To China,
"Report of the China UNFPA Independent Assessment Team,"
29 May 2002.)
19. Reviewing this evidence, the State Department
concluded that: "UNFPA is helping improve the administration
of the local family planning offices that are administering the
very social compensation fees and other penalties that are effectively
coercing women to have abortions." (Analysis of Determination
that Kemp-Kasten Amendment Precludes Further Funding to UNFPA
under Pub. L. 107-115, US State Dept., 21 July 2002.)
20. According to a report by Chinese state
news agency Xinhua, China has recently renewed its commitment
to birth quotas for at least the next 20 years. ( "PRC Law
on Population and Family Planning", 29 December 2001). The
Straits Times reported on 24 August 2002 that "China
[is] unlikely to end birth quotas soon".
21. SPUC therefore urges the Committee in
its report:
(a) to criticise the Government for its failure
to adopt the Committee's suggestion that the human rights abuses
which have occurred as a result of China's population control
programme should appear as a matter to be addressed in the list
of the government's objectives of its human rights dialogue with
China;
(b) raise this from a suggestion to a recommendation.
(c) recommend that the section on the one-child
policy be substantially re-written, incorporating the above-mentioned
concerns, before its inclusion in the 2003 Human Rights Annual
Report.
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children
(SPUC)
16 December 2002
1 Foreign Affairs Committee, Fifth Report of Session
2001-2002, Human Rights Annual Report 2001, HC 589. Back
2
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Human Rights Annual Report 2002,
Cm5601. Back
|
