Human rights is an important worldwidetopic. On September 12-13, the Sixth Beijing Forum on Human Rights was held with the theme being “Construction of Environment for Sustainable Human Rights Development.” The forum attracted more than 100 officials and human rights experts from the United Nations and 33 countries and regions.

The forum was jointly organized by the China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS), the largest human rights academic group inChina, and the China Foundation for Human Rights Development, a major civil group. The annual event was first held in 2008 and has grown to become a key platform for international human rights exchange.

“It is extremely important to have meetings like this where people from different cultures meet and have discussions about these issues,” said Tom Zwart, a law professor at Utrecht University and Director of the Netherlands School of Human Rights Research, who was attending the event for the third time.

The Chinacase

Dominating the forum’s discussions wasChina’s efforts to advance human rights by improving the rule of law and social welfare, as well as the necessity for cooperation between different approaches to human rights issues adopted by developing and developed countries.

In his speech at the forum’s opening ceremony, Cai Mingzhao, Minister of the Information Office of the State Council, said that the Chinese Government has laid great emphasis on improving people’s living conditions and the proportion of population in poverty inChinadecreased from 84 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2012.

He revealed that, by the end of last year, 790 million people inChinaparticipated in at least one basic endowment insurance scheme and the basic medical insurance achieved universal coverage.

Kate Westgarth, former Director of the Chinese Affairs Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of Britain, said thatChina’s greatest achievement in advancing human rights has been the number of people that it has lifted out of poverty. She added that such a progress is often underestimated in the West due to the fact thatChinadoes not conform to Western norms.

“I don’t think that China’s results [in improving its human rights] can be replicated in other countries, but it is a very interesting example of how the Western world’s attitudes are not the only ones and it stands as an example for developing countries of a different way of pursuing things,” Westgarth said.

Chinahas formulated two sessions of national human rights action plans. The first one was implemented on schedule between 2009 and 2010, and all goals in the plan have been achieved. Now, the second plan for 2012-15 is being put into practice.

An annual report onChina’s human rights conditions by the CSHRS released in August showed that more and more Chinese people became aware of human rights protection and the social atmosphere is increasingly favorable.

Rule of law

Luo Haocai, President of the CSHRS, said at the forum that the protection of human rights without rule of law is impossible.

Chinahas been vigorously upgrading its legal framework in response to social development. In 2013 alone, amended laws directly involving the protection of human rights, including the Criminal Procedure Law, the Civil Procedure Law, the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly and the Labor Contract Law, have come into effect.

In the first half of this year, the National People’s Congress (NPC),China’s top legislature, also widely solicited public opinions for a draft amendment to the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests. Meanwhile, an amendment to the Administrative Procedural Law, which sets the basic criterion for “administrative litigations,” has been included in the NPC’s legislative agenda in 2013.

“I am always amazed thatChinadeveloped a complete legal system in 40 years’ time,” said Zwart, who has studiedChina’s human rights situation for 10 years. “It took European nations centuries.Chinahas a wonderfully working proper legal system. I think strongly of all the initiatives that have been taken to allow citizens to participate in governance.”

Luo also said in his speech that the re-education through labor system, an administrative detention system to punish minor offenders that has become increasingly controversial, would be ceased within the year. He added that there are planned reforms of the petition system, which is also criticized by some for perceived faults in its implementation.

In February 2011, the NPC Standing Committee approved Amendment VIII to the Criminal Law, which removes the death penalty for 13 economic and nonviolent crimes, reducing the death penalty charges by nearly one fifth. The amendment also adopted restrictive regulations relating to the application of the death penalty to offenders aged 75 or above at the time of the trial.

Before that, the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate jointly issued regulations in June 2010, requiring more stringent standards on the review and judgment of evidence involved in death penalty cases. The amended Criminal Procedure Law requires that all retrials for death penalty cases must be held publicly and that supervision over death sentence retrials be tightened.

“A fundamental principle of the rule of law is the separation of powers so as to avoid their concentration, which, as experience shows, often leads to abuses of power,” said Christophe Peschoux, an official from the office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, while making a speech at the forum.

At the beginning of the year,Chinalaunched a new round of reform to transform governmental functions. This reform puts an emphasis on the regulation of governmental power, the decentralization of power and how it is granted to the market and society. Scrapping excess administrative examination and approval procedures is the central point of the reform.

Keeping cyberspace clean

Combating false rumors online while not violating people’s freedom of speech was a hot topic at the forum.

“People have the right to gather information and express their opinions and they also have the right to protect their reputation and privacy. So a balance has to be found,” said Zwart. He admitted that striking such a balance is no easy task for government decision-makers and he agreed that there is no uniform way to accomplish this balance as national conditions vary.

“These boundary discussions on what you can allow people to say and what should be prohibited [on the Internet] will continue forever,” he said.

As part of China’s campaign to crack down on organized online misinformation spreading, people who post defamatory comments online will face up to three years in prison if their statements are widely reposted and shared, according to a legal interpretation jointly released by the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate on September 9.

The document stipulates that people will face defamation charges if false rumors they post online are viewed by more than 5,000 Internet users or re-posted more than 500 times.

“A responsible society cannot allow people on the Internet to spread lies about other people,” Westgarth said. “The Internet is one of the places where individuals’ rights have to be balanced with the rights of society in order to exist peacefully and harmoniously.”CA