Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-115)
MR BRAD
ADAMS AND
MS CORINNA-BARBARA
FRANCIS
8 MARCH 2006
Q100 Andrew Mackinlay: This was Mr
Blair?
Mr Adams: Yes. It was on a press
conference on TV. A Chinese journalist asked the question. This
is endemic; it is not the British Government only. The French
Government has been much worse; the German Government has been
even worse than the French; and the US has vacillated. They are
all in thrall to the Chinese market. They all feel as though they
are going to put at risk other issues, such as foreign policy
issues. They are now going to the Chinese as supplicants on international
affairs, and so they do not want to jeopardise North Korea; they
do not want to jeopardise Darfur; they do not want to jeopardise
other things. We have this self-censorship going on throughout
most governments. In their defence they say that they have the
dialogues. I think that is the critical problem for dialogues.
Q101 Andrew Mackinlay: I deplore
this censorship and control of the internet. It seems to me they
are much like King Canute, are they not? They are just going to
be overwhelmed. The need for them to expand skills, science, knowledge
and so on is going to mean that they will not be able to sustain
this level of control and access to what people will look at,
read and draw from the internet. I do not know much about the
internet. I can just about switch it on. It seems to me that is
the logic, is it not? It is all in vain. It is ridiculous. This
is not going to be discussed.
Ms Francis: The internet started
in China in 1993. Since then, everyone has been saying that and
hoping that for 13 years. During that time, certainly it has been
the hope of the global community and Chinese civil society that
the internet cannot be contained. The Chinese Government has amazed
us in its ability precisely to do that, to contain it. A very
small minority of extremely technically sophisticated urbanites
can get around firewalls; they can find ways. The very dedicated,
technologically skilled can get around it, but for the majority
of people, and what matters in a sense is how the Chinese Government
comes off to the majority of the people, it has succeeded in containing
it through a combination of technology and increasingly sophisticated
filters. In the beginning, these were quite crude filters where
they would just blank out a whole website; it just would not come
up. Now they do it with word packages, so that certain phrases
of certain words are filtered and that will then blank out that
particular thing. It has become much more sophisticated with the
aid of Western technology. There is also the element of self-censorship.
Average people are afraid to lose their jobs; they are afraid
to be kicked out of school; they are afraid they will not be promoted;
and they are afraid they will not get their bonuses. So there
is a very sophisticated multi-level system by which writers, journalists,
regular internet users, students and blog managers throughout
society operate self-censorship, which is very successful. Blog
managers decide to censor certain issues because they know that
if they do not censor them themselves, then the government will
shut down the entire site. A self-censorship operates. In some
sense, that is what really makes it successful, not just the technology.
The technology is quite formidable in terms of blocking out certain
sites, but there is a pervasiveness. Now even at internet cafés
you have to show your ID and the manager of the internet café
has to take your ID, all your identification and monitor all the
sites that have been visited. It is pervasive through the system.
In Guangzhou, the main city in the south of China, they have now
instituted the internet police. Two cute little figures called
Jing and Cha, the names for police, come up on the screen to remind
the user that the searches he is going to undertake will be monitored.
Literally two little figures in cute police uniforms pop up on
the screen to remind the user on a constant daily basis on all
of the searches. We know technologically that in the West as well
governments can go in and subpoena information on exactly the
time, and all of that is recorded and can be retrieved. The internet
is not this free-for-all, anonymous institution that we would
all like it to be and think of it as; it is not, indeed, not at
all.
Mr Adams: In terms of the critique
I have just given of governments being in thrall to the Chinese
Government and not speaking out and sending the wrong signals,
you have the Chinese Government essentially being able tame Microsoft,
Yahoo and Google in recent months. If you do a search in China
with their search engines, Microsoft has made human rights and
democracy lead to a blank screen. Google has actually agreed to
be the censor, not to be censored, and accept that as a cost of
doing business actually to be the censor. These are huge businesses
with market caps that exceed General Motors and major industrial
concerns. These are the biggest businesses in the world.
Mr Illsley: We saw press articles last
week on this.
Chairman: We have just received what
I would call a self-serving letter from Google explaining their
position. It would be interesting to see their reaction to what
you have said today.
Q102 Mr Pope: I have a follow-up
to the question about the human rights dialogue. I welcome what
you have said and it was interesting. Would there be great downsides
if we abandoned the dialogue? Would there be downsides in terms
of human rights issues in China? Would they take that as the fact
that we had just lost interest? You referred to the perfectly
reasonable foreign policy objectives that the West has with regard
to Iraq and North Korea and wherever. Do you think they would
be damaged if we broke off the dialogue and took a more robust
public view?
Mr Adams: Banning the dialogue
without corresponding changes in the way the governments address
human rights with the Chinese Government would not serve any interest
because we would just have fewer exchanges on human rights. I
do not see a political will for governments to take on human rights.
In our submission we said that human rights should be at the heart
of the agenda again as it used to be. It used to be that every
summit was about human rights and then other things. Now human
rights struggles to find its way on to the agenda at the highest
level meetings. I am offering perfect world-ism, that we should
put human rights back at the heart and we should have robust dialogues
and come together and reinforce each other. I do think there is
a risk if you just abandon them, which is why we all but said
abandon them because we do not see that, and we do not see that
across the board. If the UK Government did it, Jacques Chirac
would go in and try to sell French products tomorrow and undercut
the UK and that would put the UK in the position of feeling that
they cannot go this alone. We are talking to all the dialogue
countries. No-one disagrees with our critique, but there is no
commitment. That is what is missing. I do not think that an abandonment
of the dialogue would be seen as a signal of lack of interest.
I am not worried about that. The Chinese would see it and if it
were abandoned, it would be abandoned presumably with a statement
from the foreign ministry (our Foreign Office and other foreign
ministries) saying there was a failure and we are abandoning them
because they were not producing anything. I do not think they
would harm relations on North Korea and other things because those
interests exist. We are saying that, important as those interests
are, you can still find space to talk about human rights. The
Chinese are not going to walk away from you on Darfur and North
Korea over raising human rights issues. They are much more mature
than that. They have many more interests than that. They also
have economic interests. It is almost always seen as the West
losing out if we raise these things with China on economics.
Q103 Chairman: Can we take you back
to what was said earlier on about specific human rights abuses?
Ms Francis, I think you referred to torture. Is torture a systematic
policy encouraged from the top or is it something that is carried
out at lower levels, which the central government is trying to
reduce or minimise?
Ms Francis: It is certainly not
something that the central government encourages. I think the
central government would like to see a reduction in torture. They
have undertaken a number of reforms; for instance, they have experimented
with having interrogations tape-recorded. They have had a campaign
to crack down on police extracting confessions through torture.
They have attempted to deal with this but, as in many of the other
areas of effort, it is not thorough enough, it is not fundamental
enough, the institutional mechanisms are not powerful enough to
undercut the phenomenon. For instance, the fact that courts still
accept evidence based on torture, and confession is still a very
significant piece of evidence in a criminal procedure, encourages
the police to use torture in order to extract confessions. You
would have to have a judicial system strong enough to reject that
kind of evidence to start to change the proceedings. No, I do
not think the central government wants torture; they would like
to reduce it. They just have not taken significantly fundamental
reforms to eradicate it.
Q104 Chairman: Does the same apply
to the death penalty?
Ms Francis: No. I think the death
penalty is very different. I think the average Chinese person
believes the death penalty is legitimate and fair. We have just
had a young journalist from Beijing University visiting Amnesty
recently and we had a fiery, passionate discussion about the death
penalty, with people trying to get their views on the death penalty.
Even the most educated liberal parts of society are still for
the death penalty. There is not much of a social, cultural movement
away from the death penalty. That is a much more difficult, probably
long-term issue, but it is still one that we hope to influence.
Q105 Chairman: Is there any reliable
evidence about whether the death penalty is increasing or being
reduced?
Ms Francis: We produce statistics
from year to year. We know we can document only a small proportion
of the totality. We do not have significant evidence that it is
significantly reduced. They have brought in some reforms reinstating
review by a Supreme People's Court, which may reduce that, but
it will be a long process. The danger is that they are really
entrenching the system even more. I think it is still used very
widely. In fact, recently—and I apologise that my written
submission is late—Guangdong province has just changed the
law so that violent bag-snatching is now subject to the death
penalty. There used to be a maximum of three years for that crime,
and now they have made it subject to the death penalty. This is
definitely against the trend of moving away and trying to reduce
the scope of crimes that are subject to the death penalty. This
is definitely against the trend.
Q106 Chairman: While we are dealing
with these matters, China uses forced labour and re-education
through labour, as it is called. Is that going out of fashion
or is it still an essential part of the way that the penal system
works?
Mr Adams: Re-education through
labour is an area where there had been some hope and signs of
progress. In the dialogues, the Chinese had said that they are
going to move towards phasing this system out. That reform has
stopped in its tracks recently because it appears that there are
different views in the Chinese Government of the value of that.
They are introducing some partial elements of judicial review,
which probably will not amount to very much for individuals caught
up in the system. In this system people can be detained essentially
arbitrarily for two to three years or four years. This is a great
illustration, and I am glad you have brought it up, of the way
that the reform impulse has been stopped. This would be an easy
one to deal with because law enforcement would still have a lot
of tools. The criminal law is quite expensive in China. They would
have no problem dealing with a lot of people through other means.
From what we hear of the Public Security Bureau, they do not like
the idea that someone else may decide that their arrest was wrong
and that they will not be able to hold people if they think it
is appropriate to hold them. This is not going forward.
Q107 Sir John Stanley: We have covered
the issue of the internet and the success that they are having
in making it very difficult for people to gain access to the internet.
Could we turn to TV and radio? I am talking about foreign-owned
stations. Am I right in assuming that the impact of foreign television
is effectively negligible in human rights terms because it is
successfully blanked out or, in the case of the Murdoch show,
the degree of self-censorship is a sort of done deal with the
Chinese Government? What about radio? Is there any significant
success in terms of the people in China being able to pick up
the foreign-funded overseas radio stations, the American stations,
BBC World Service, and indeed other foreign services, which are
broadcasting in Chinese? Are those a useful instrument or not
in terms of trying to get greater understanding of human rights
aspirations and what goes on elsewhere in the world?
Ms Francis: Television is very
effectively controlled. From the Government's perspective, it
is a very powerful medium, so they are very intent and they have
consistently controlled foreign ownership. With radio, they have
purchased and acquired I think even better jamming capabilities.
They are very good at jamming radio programmes. It is a cat and
mouse game. The VOA attempts to switch its frequencies and tries
to get in through different ways and the Chinese are constantly
attempting to block. I know, for instance, that Radio Free Asia,
which attempts to broadcast into various different languages,
is able to get in occasionally; it is just not consistent. Again,
it is a bit like the internet; the government is constantly trying
to keep up in terms of blockage. It takes a lot of effort on the
part of the individual. You cannot just click on your radio. It
is a constant cat and mouse game. Everything that makes it more
difficult is a success for the government in the sense that only
the most dedicated people can find ways round it. You cannot count
on being able to turn your radio on and hear the programme.
Mr Adams: I would like to make
a plug for the British Government (the Prime Minister or the Foreign
Secretary) to take up the subject of the BBC website a little
more and it being blocked with the Chinese Government. That could
be a major discussion point when they meet with the government
because there is no excuse on that.
Q108 Chairman: Last year at Shanghai
airport, I tried to log on to it and could not get through, but
I did manage to get on to the Guardian. Can I ask you whether
the Chinese are exporting to repressive regimes this ability to
block either the internet or other technologies to deal with television
and radio? Potentially, will there be a growth industry in this?
Ms Francis: It has not happened
yet but it could happen very soon. Just setting the precedent
that the internet can effectively be controlled, censored and
monitored by a powerful government sends the message to all sorts
of other regimes that they can do the same. What was supposed
to be the internet in terms of a global, borderless phenomenon
simply will not be the case.
Q109 Andrew Mackinlay: Are computers
being used by what are described in China as patriotic hackers?
Ms Francis: Not that we know of
yet but we do attempt to have a fairly good security system.
Mr Adams: There is one very clear
example of this where China is exporting its firewall. There is
something called the World Society for Information Summit, which
was held in Tunisia a few months ago. China paid for all the internet
technology and the computers that were being used. The Tunisian
Government set up an official site for people to use computers
and email. We had staff there who discovered that the Chinese
had stocked the computers with lock boxes with keypad technology.
I was actually sending to one of our legal officers a report on
China for review, not thinking that Tunisia was an unsafe place
for her to review it. She discovered, and the Tunisian authorities
admitted this, that the Chinese had provided the computers and
the technology, which had never existed in Tunisia before, and
they were copying keystrokes. She wrote me back an email and said,
"I am horrified because I cannot retrieve what is in the
hard drive and the Chinese can. I am sending you an email saying
I have to stop working on this and so I will have to put out the
report later than I expected".
Q110 Chairman: Are any Western companies
involved in this technology that the Chinese are using?
Ms Francis: Besides the major
companies that have signed on to censorship, Nortel and Cisko
are two of the companies that have provided the hardware for the
Chinese censorship system.
Mr Adams: They are going to break
down the hardware and then try to make it themselves. As with
a lot of electronic goods, the quality is not quite there yet.
There is no reason to expect that it will not be there over time.
Ms Francis: The initial technology
has been provided by these Western companies. We know of at least
these two companies that have provided technology.
Q111 Mr Hamilton: One of the other
ways of fighting repression and organising surreptitiously is
the mobile phone. How developed is China's mobile cellular network?
Is it used at all for illegal communication? Is it censored?
Ms Francis: It is and that is
why when SARS first started to spread, the government was clamping
down on the internet, so people were not able to communicate about
SARS through the internet. The government did not know about mobile
phone communication. People were not communicating for any subversive
reasons; they were simply afraid and wanted information, and so
they started using their mobile phones. Because of that, the Chinese
Government subsequently has now tightened control over mobile
phone use and text messaging. My apologies as I am not very technically
sophisticated, but I know that they have now come up with ways
in which to monitor mobile phone use. In fact, quite sadly, one
activist in Shanghai was located while in hiding from the government
when he made a call from his mobile phone. It was precisely SARS
that really triggered the government's awareness of the potential
of mobile phones.
Q112 Mr Hamilton: I suppose it will
vary according to economic regions, but do you know the percentage
of saturation of cellular use?
Ms Francis: I cannot tell you
the percentage but I know it very large.
Mr Adams: In urban areas it is
very large and it is also even in rural areas.
Ms Francis: That is because of
the weakness of the landlines. They are not well developed; in
fact they have gone to mobile phones at higher rates than the
West.
Q113 Chairman: In the time left to
us, it is important that we ask some questions about Tibet. Has
the investment, the economic development in Tibet which has been
taking place, in any way helped the Tibetans in terms of alleviation
and elimination of poverty or has it just become a negative in
terms of their culture and their society?
Mr Adams: May I read something
sent to me by a Tibetan who I think is a very moderate personality,
someone I know very well? He said: Please tell them that as civilisation
is being erased from the map through the combination of hegemonic
modernisation, Tibetans have virtually no ownership in the development
process and political repression and because the Tibetans are
so marginalised, they have no counterweight any more. There are
a couple of adjectives in there that are quite emotive. I think
that is a pretty fair assessment. Most Tibetans feel that this
is not just about politics any more but about their culture and
it is really under threat, that the Chinese-isation, Hanisation,
Sinisation, whatever you want to call it, of Tibet has really
taken over. For the jobs that pay good money, mostly Chinese language
is a barrier. Tibetans learn Tibetan in school in their early
years and then switch over to Chinese, so that they are inevitably
behind Chinese migrants who are there. Anecdotally, people point
to taxi drivers more and more being Chinese as that is a job that
pays cash. There is an attempt to move people off the land and
into apartment buildings and new neighbourhoods that are built
mostly in urban areas, sometimes in more rural areas, changing
their way of life. Most Tibetans do not feel that they have a
major stake in whatever economic benefits have come. We have talked
to Tibetans about the new railway. They are absolutely freaked
out about it; they are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that this
is the end of their culture and the end of their civilization
over time, that it has just opened a door that can never be closed.
Q114 Chairman: Is there then a sense
of time running out? In that situation, as the Dalai Lama, who
is still a very dominant figure to Tibetans, gets older, is there
a prospect of an imminent political breakthrough? I understand
talks have been going on for some time. As the Dalai Lama grows
older and the dispute continues about his successor, the Panchen
Lama, is there in a sense any window of opportunity for a settlement
or is it in China's interests just to say that they will play
this long and create facts on the ground?
Mr Adams: I think the latter.
I would hope that there would be a breakthrough, although it is
hard to see what breakthrough there could be on equal terms. China
has very little incentive to make a deal that in any way cuts
against what they consider to be their interests. They hold all
the cards in Tibet right now. No governments are willing to challenge
Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Human rights groups do not take
positions on sovereignty and only a rump of Tibetans do so. The
Dalai Lama has been extremely conciliatory. He has offered concession
after concession and they have not been met. They do have one
problem, which is that the Panchen Lama probably would not be
accepted and that could lead to major unrest. It depends how this
plays out. There could be unhappiness but no unrest; there could
be major unrest if they try to force the Panchen Lama and do not
replace the Dalai Lama and keep the rhetoric about the Panchen
Lama being the pre-eminent figure in Tibetan Buddhism. My guess
is that they will play that situationally.
Q115 Chairman: In the last question,
may I take you to Zhejiang and the Uighur population that is a
Muslim community? Can you give us a sense of the human rights
situation there and whether that has become worse recently because
of the global context and the war on terrorism and so on?
Ms Francis: I think you are absolutely
right and that it has become worse. Zhejiang has many of the problems
of Tibet. It is in a similar situation but it is in an even more
dire situation because it has very little international recognition.
It does not so far have a leader who could highlight the causes
of that people and because of the war on terror and the use that
the Chinese Government can make of the fact that this is a Muslim
issue, or they make it into a Muslim issue. I think the situation
in Zhejiang has become increasingly worse and worse over the years.
Again, it is also a cultural issue. It is a people who are afraid
of losing their identity. The Chinese have really attacked language,
which is essential to culture. It used to be that one could be
educated in Uighur all the way through to university level. They
have gradually introduced the Hanese language as a compulsory
language to younger and younger ages and now it is compulsory
at the primary school level. Essentially individual Uighurs cannot
be educated in Uighur. In terms of any sign that a writer would
write anything that might vaguely have to do with some form of
nationalism, Uighur nationalism is cracked down on. There is the
case of a Uighur writer who wrote a short story about a wild pigeon.
It vaguely refers, or they thought it referred, to the Uighur
people and was a symbol. Just for that he was imprisoned for 10
years. Any sign that you are expressing anything having to do
with your cultural identity as a Uighur is not allowed. There
is a massive similar situation of the Chinese Government saying
that they are developing the Zhejiang autonomous region but the
Uighurs have been extremely marginalised in that process and have
no part in that process. In some ways, it is also a policy of
Han migration. The Uighurs used to be a large majority in the
region but they are becoming a gradually shrinking minority there
as Han people migrate. Often the land is taken and given to Han
people, the Chinese people. I think you have a similar situation
but more dire because there is even less global awareness or global
attention and a voice for the Uighurs.
Chairman: Thank you both for coming and
giving us such a wide-ranging perspective on human rights issues.
We are grateful to you.
| 
