Chapter 4 The Case of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights
4.3 The case of the Joint Letter to the European Union
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In addition to working with these specific organizations, TAHR periodically joins coalitions of NGOs to make joint statements in areas of common interest. This will be discussed in detail in the next section.
4.3 The Case of the Joint Letter to the European Union
As part of its international interactions, TAHR often teams up with other NGOs around the world to issue joint statements on issues of shared importance. These statements are usually made with the intent of influencing relevant policymakers, often in advance of an important political event. In this section, I will use one joint statement as a case study to evaluate whether it was able to influence its target audience.
In June 2018, TAHR joined a coalition of NGOs in issuing a joint statement to the European Union (EU) roughly a month before a series of talks between the EU and China were to take place. The letter was addressed to Mr. Donald Tusk and Mr. Jean-Claude Junker, the president of the European Council and the president of the European Commission, respectively. The open letter addressed a long list of human rights concerns that the coalition of NGOs hoped the EU representatives would bring up while meeting with Chinese counterparts.
Among the statement’s signatories, in addition to TAHR, were Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, FIDH, Freedom House, International Campaign for Tibet, Uyghur Human Rights Project, Frontline Defenders, and Human Rights in China, among others. The letter, which can be accessed on TAHR’s website, opens by noting that the human rights situation in China “has further deteriorated” since 2017 (NGO Coalition 2018). The letter then moves into a discussion of Liu Xiaobo, a prominent pro-democracy writer, and Liu Xia, his widow, stating that Beijing “refused to
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allow 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner and journalist Liu Xiaobo to leave the country to seek treatment for liver cancer, such that he died under state guard in July. The forthcoming EU-China summit will take place one year on from Liu Xiaobo’s death”
(NGO Coalition 2018).
The letter later explicitly requests that EU representatives urge Chinese authorities to release the poet and widow Liu Xia. It also brings up the case of Gui Minhai: “In January 2018, Chinese authorities forcibly disappeared Swedish citizen and bookseller Gui Minhai while he was traveling with Swedish diplomats. Their inability to visit him in detention violates China’s obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations” (NGO Coalition 2018).
Also early on in the joint letter is a blunt statement criticizing EU inaction at a meeting with Chinese representatives about two weeks prior: “At the EU-China Strategic Dialogue on June 1, 2018, in Brussels, the EU once again did not publically challenge China over any human rights violations, … publically mention a single human rights defender, or insist on immediate and unconditional releases of those wrongly imprisoned” (NGO Coalition 2018).
The letter goes on to give a thorough account of current human rights concerns relating to China, ranging from censorship to ethnic minority issues to forced television confessions:
Our organizations continue to document China's abusive campaign against independent civil society, ethnic and religious minorities, the rule of law, and press freedom. The Chinese government has created a comprehensive national security legal architecture that is misused by the authorities to silence dissent, censor information, and harass and prosecute human rights defenders. Authorities have subjected lawyers and human rights defenders to show trials, airing excerpted forced
"confessions" on state television and social media. Police coerce
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detainees' into complying through torture and other ill-treatment, denying access to lawyers, and holding them incommunicado for months.
The government oversees one of the strictest online censorship regimes in the world, has limited the public's access to censorship circumvention tools, and strengthened ideological control over education and mass media. The Chinese government has increasingly promoted its notion of
"internet sovereignty" to rewrite accepted rules so that censorship and surveillance would become the norm globally.
Authorities in Tibetan-populated areas severely restrict religious freedom, speech, movement, and peaceful assembly, and have failed to respect Tibetans' culture, language, and traditions, or redress popular concerns about mining and land grabs by local officials. In Xinjiang, authorities have stepped up mass surveillance and adopted new policies denying Uyghurs cultural and religious rights. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are being arbitrarily detained. Elsewhere, fears of retaliation for opposing Beijing's policies were heightened when Hong Kong courts last year disqualified four pro-democracy lawmakers and jailed three prominent pro-democracy student leaders. (NGO Coalition 2018)
The letter then addresses the EU and candidly evaluates the efficacy of the EU’s efforts to curb China’s human rights abuses. In a sober assessment, the letter reads:
The EU's June 2017 human rights dialogue with China unsurprisingly failed to produce any concrete results. Given China's refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue and the EU's unwillingness to set and maintain clear benchmarks for human rights improvements in China as a requirement for further dialogues, it is difficult to see how future rounds will produce a more useful outcome. Committing to another round of this exercise appears to be the only human- rights-related "deliverable" of the Strategic Dialogue, a decision that should be revisited. The EU calls for the releases of wrongfully detained activists but, in our view, lacks a strategy to achieve those goals, and imposes no consequences when China refuses to deliver.
The EU's broad and principled commitments to promoting human rights has not been matched in China with a willingness to act or a determination to at least achieve releases. Issuing statements calling for the release of arbitrarily held lawyers and activists is welcome but not enough - especially without consequences for a failure to release people. The Chinese government's human rights abuses inside and outside China increasingly present serious threats to the EU and its values, to key institutions on which the EU depends for peace, security, and human rights, and to the citizens of EU member states. Each missed opportunity
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challenge China's abusive conduct helps enable it. (NGO Coalition 2018)After this disillusioned commentary on the EU’s efforts to steer China in the direction of liberal human rights norms, the joint statement moves on to concrete recommendations on how EU representatives should best go about bringing up human rights issues with China:
• Publicly and repeatedly call - before, during, and after the summit- for the release of Liu Xia, Wang Quanzhang, Tashi Wangchuk, llham Tohti, Lee Ming-che, and Gui Minhai, among many others detained for non-internationally recognized crimes and solely for exercising their human rights, and announce an EU strategy to ensure their releases;
• Invoke the EU's June 2016 China strategy to suspend the human rights dialogue with China until it can make meaningful contributions to the promotion of rights, and, in the meantime, pursue a "shadow" dialogue with human rights activists from across China who would welcome such an interaction with the EU;
• Identify specific human rights issues that the Chinese government needs to address as a strategic priority for the EU and its member states;
• Adopt new Foreign Affairs Council conclusions on human rights in China;
and
• Commit to publicly marking the first anniversary of Liu Xiaobo's death in July, the twentieth anniversary of China's signing, but not ratifying, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in October, and the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown in June 2019.
(NGO Coalition 2018)
The letter then reiterates the importance of the EU standing up for human rights issues in China, before ending with a list of the signatories of the joint statement. The joint statement is an important example of TAHR taking part in a time-specific act of advocacy that bridged the interests of many different international NGOs, both those
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that specialize in China-related issues and those that maintain global mandates.
For the purpose of this thesis, this joint statement is an important document because it offers an example of Taiwanese citizens, through an NGO, taking part in an effort to influence an organization (the EU) from which they’re excluded. Of course, Taiwan is not excluded from the EU in the same way that it’s excluded from intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations, as the European Union excludes all non-European countries. However, this case study nonetheless represents a situation in which Taiwanese people seek to influence international institutions and global discourse relating to human rights.
Also worth noting is that the Chinese Communist Party insists, often in response to criticism that Taiwan is unfairly excluded from international fora, that Taiwan’s perspective is not excluded but represented just as the interests of other Chinese provinces are represented; therefore, it is interesting to note that according to the Chinese representatives interacting with European counterparts, Taiwan is supposedly also represented, although of course anyone with Taiwanese citizenship would not be allowed to take part.
We will now turn to the question, was TAHR (along with the other NGO signatories to the joint statement) successful in influencing the EU’s interaction with China and shaping subsequent human rights discourse?
The joint statement from the EU and China following the EU-China Summit on July 16, 2018 was anticlimactic and only made brief mention of human rights. “The EU and China agreed to conduct exchanges on human rights at the bilateral and international level on the basis of equality and mutual respect, including in the context of
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UN human rights mechanisms,” read a statement issued on July 17. “Both sides welcomed the holding of their Human Rights Dialogue in China in July” (EU and China 2018).
However, this was a joint statement agreed to by both the EU and China, which explains why the human rights portion of the statement was relatively toothless. More significant developments in the realm of human rights took place a week earlier, when on July 9-10 in Beijing the annual EU-China Human Rights Dialogue was held. In a monumental breakthrough, on July 10, China released Liu Xia, allowing her to travel to take up exile in Germany. “Liu Xia, the widow of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, has arrived in Berlin, having left Beijing after almost eight years of living under house arrest and days before the anniversary of her husband’s death,” read an article in The Guardian on July 10 (Kuo 2018).
The Liu Xia breakthrough of course cannot be credited to the NGO joint statement alone. Liu Xia’s release came after fierce efforts not just from civil society groups, but also journalists, scholars, diplomats, and elected officials. And it is impossible to know what exactly convinced the top echelons of China’s leadership to decide to release her. Some observers suggested it may have been an effort by Xi Jinping to garner the goodwill of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to capitalize on global dislike of United States President Donald Trump.
But Liu Xia’s release nonetheless represents a huge victory for TAHR and the other NGOs who drafted the joint statement. Liu Xia’s release was one of the most high-profile human rights breakthroughs in China during the Xi Jinping era, and TAHR can rightfully claim to have taken part in the global effort to bring about that breakthrough.
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In addition to the release of Liu Xia, the EU issued a statement detailing the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue of 2018. Significantly, the EU’s statement expresses many of the same concerns brought up by the joint statement published by TAHR and other NGOs, and it calls for the release of a long list of individuals who are in prison for human rights-related activity. Prisoners the EU urged China to release included names that the NGO joint statement also mentioned, including Gui Minhai, Wang Quanzhang, Ilham Tohti, Lee Ming-che, and Tashi Wangchuk. Below is a portion of the EU’s statement:
The EU also stated its expectation that all detained individuals be allowed to be represented by a lawyer of their choosing, be given the possibility of meeting their family members, have access to appropriate medical assistance when required, and have allegations of their torture and mistreatment promptly investigated.
Participants also discussed the promotion of freedom of religion and belief, and the rights of persons belonging to minorities, especially Tibetans and Uighurs. The system of political re-education camps which has been established in Xinjiang is of particular concern.
Other issues raised include the death penalty, systemic problems in the criminal justice system, including cases of arbitrary detention, restrictions on freedom of expression and association, and as well as the implementation of China’s Foreign NGO Activity Management Law.
The promotion of human rights in international fora and the need to implement recommendations from international human rights bodies were also discussed, also in view of China's upcoming Universal Periodic Review in November 2018. (EU 2018)
Several other things that both the EU statement and the NGO joint statement both emphasize are the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in re-education camps in Xinjiang, the repression of Tibetans, and allegations of torture.
A European Union official who took part in the July 2018 EU-China Human
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confirmed that he/she and other EU officials read the joint letter and took its contents into account when preparing to interact with their Chinese counterparts.
Regarding my classification system explained in the analytical approach section of Chapter 1, I put this case study into tier two, the tier with the second-highest efficacy.
This is because it goes beyond simply publishing statements to the public and targets a specific audience, hoping to influence their behavior at an event. The advocacy, however, cannot be easily extricated from confounding variables, due to the high volume of information published on the same topic that could have also influenced the European Union decision-makers.
4.4 Conclusion
The NGO joint statement to the European Union and the EU’s statement from the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue offer an example of global NGOs trying to affect the actions taken by political leaders through advocacy. In this case, it also gives us the chance to observe a Taiwanese NGO playing a role in that process. Was TAHR able to influence global political interactions that Taiwanese citizens could not have formally taken part in? I argue yes. While it is impossible to know exactly what information EU leaders consulted, in addition to the joint letter, before entering into human rights discussions with China, I posit that the NGO joint letter played a role in shaping how the EU handled the talks with China and what issues were most important to them.
Evidence for this, I argue, is that the EU explicitly mentioned many of the same human rights defenders brought up in the NGO letter, most notably Liu Xia, but also Gui Minhai, Wang Quanzhang, Ilham Tohti, Lee Ming-che, and Tashi Wangchuk; also the EU condemned China for many of the same issues touched upon in the letter, such as the
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situations in Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as allegations of torture among human rights prisoners.
In this case study, we see that although Taiwanese citizens cannot directly take part in an international forum such as the annual EU-China Human Rights Dialogue, they can make an indirect impact through advocacy done through non-governmental organizations. An important dimension of this impact relates to the global discourse surrounding human rights. As discussed earlier, China is in the midst of a long-term attempt to alter the international understanding of human rights to match its own authoritarian values.
E-ling Chiu, in or interview on April 26, 2019, elaborated on why the EU likes to interact with Taiwan: “For EU they also believe that Taiwan plays an important role to affect China because we speak the same language, we can speak and write Mandarin, so they believe that the democracy of Taiwan or the freedom of Taiwan” could maybe have some effect on the Chinese government. EU leaders hereby likely see Taiwan as a linchpin in nudging China towards liberal political values.
As Sterling-Folker (2013) noted, “social contexts, and hence identities and interests, may be consciously reshaped by particularly shrewd or conscientious individuals” (131). Although China’s leaders may be trying to erase human rights as we know them, through efforts such as the NGO joint letter to the EU, Taiwanese citizens are using NGOs like TAHR to buttress the liberal democratic understanding of human rights and oppose China’s ideological campaign against it. As discussed earlier, these efforts benefit Taiwan’s own interests and national security because human rights are
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an important part of the country’s soft power and appeal to the United States, its main ally.
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Chapter 5 Conclusion
In this thesis, I have explored the question, can Taiwan’s civil society act as an avenue for it to influence international arenas from which it is excluded? I’ve also probed the ability of Taiwan to impact global discourse pertaining to human rights. In addition to these fundamental questions, I analyzed whether Taiwan’s influence via NGOs worked in accordance with Taiwan’s own interests and strengthened its national security.
The answer to these questions, as I argued in this thesis, is yes. Taiwan’s civil society does provide a path for Taiwanese citizens to influence international institutions from which they’re excluded. This influence often makes significant contributions to global human rights discourse. Taiwan’s interests and national security are enhanced by its NGO diplomacy, owing to how human rights NGOs strengthen Taiwan’s soft power, reinforce its partnership with the United States, and undercut the Chinese Communist Party’s moral legitimacy.
I reached this conclusion by examining two case studies: advocacy done by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and advocacy done by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR).
RSF, an international NGO headquartered in Paris that advocates press freedom, operates a foreign bureau in Taipei. A Taiwanese full-time employee and a Taiwanese part-time intern at the Taipei bureau worked to complete a case report on allegations of torture that a Chinese journalist named Huang Qi suffered while in prison. When the case report was finished, the Taiwanese full-time employee forwarded it to the Paris headquarters, where Paul Coppin, head of legal desk for RSF, sent the case report to
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the United Nations by email. A little more than a month later, the United Nations responded to the torture allegations, repeating an earlier opinion by the UN that recognized Huang Qi’s detention as arbitrary, and urging Chinese authorities to release him.
The case is a confirmation of the hypothesis that Taiwanese people can
The case is a confirmation of the hypothesis that Taiwanese people can