Evidence of meeting #32 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was china.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Potter.
We're going to go to Mr. Goldring. He'll have a question, and then we will be going to Mr. Chin right off the bat.
May 27th, 2008 / 4:15 p.m.
Conservative
Peter Goldring Conservative Edmonton East, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Potter, you stated that most of the abuses were justifiable by the Chinese authorities. One of the concerning comments was that the lawyers being important enough to be cracked down on is an improvement; it's progress. I suggest that it is rather the opposite of that. It instead highlights the ongoing inadequacy of the Canada-China bilateral human rights dialogue if these things are progressing in that way.
There was a comment made, too, by Mr. Chin that China is more apt to view discussion on this under, I suppose, the lens and light of international human rights agreements, but your comment was that this was so when they were enforceable and legitimate and effective. Maybe you could expand on that, because certainly within that, my understanding is that there are many human rights provisos and acts that are internationally understood by most of the major communities.
What is the difficulty here, particularly with their concern about enforcement and legitimacy being effective? What can be done to change the discussion on that, to maybe go to the source of the problem, which is tightening up the legitimacy of some of these international regulations?
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Goldring.
Although it was directed to Mr. Potter, I'm going to go to Mr. Chin. I think they'll all have an opportunity.
Mr. Chin, some comments.
4:20 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Department of Political Science, York University
If we look at the UN conventions on political and civil rights, I think you can see where China hasn't fully ratified all of the conditions. I think one area--for example, on the use of the death penalty and things like that--is where you can see China is gradually shifting to constraining its liberal use of the death penalty.
That's where, through constructive engagements, for example, on CIDA's programs in China, we've been able to bring over Canadian legal specialists, practitioners, who have been able to work with the Chinese side to both encourage them to limit the use of the death penalty, but also to work with them on other legal reforms that can be brought into the Chinese system. I think that's one type of method at the bilateral level. And then I guess at the international level, through the UN, is where there's a need for building up consensus and agreement on the actual conventions themselves. That's where I see the importance of diplomacy, at these two levels: bilateral, through foreign aid programming, and then diplomatic, at the multilateral.
4:20 p.m.
Professor of Law and Director of the Institute of Asian Research, Director of Chinese Legal Studies, Centre for Asian Legal Studies, University of British Columbia
Thank you.
When I mentioned that abuses are often justified by reference to the Chinese legal system, that's true. When we look at the imprisonment of people like Hu Jia, for example, that is justified by reference to Chinese law. I think that should give us some pause when we assume that the text of Chinese laws, whether they be on open governance or human rights conditions.... They put human rights protection into the constitution, but they qualified it by reference to socialism, which then includes party power and so on. The legal system works differently there than we might expect a rule-of-law system to work; the abuses are often justified by reference to law. However, this itself is a major change from 20 or 30 years ago.
I would like to return to the role of lawyers, which is the other question you mentioned. Lawyers are less easily controlled. They're more assertive. Therefore, they're more of a challenge to the government now than they were 10 years ago.
I didn't go through my bio at the beginning of my discussion, but you have a copy of my c.v. I won't belabour the point, but I've been involved with Chinese courts and lawyers for quite a long time. I can assure you that 10 years ago Chinese lawyers were largely irrelevant to the issue of human rights in China, whereas today they are really in the forefront. That is why the regime has felt it necessary to try to put pressure on them to restrict their behaviour.
It is in one way regrettable that the regime is doing that--and I would agree with that, certainly--but at the same time we can see progress in the importance of law and legal institutions and lawyers. That shows a broader systemic evolution, which I think is driven by China's internal needs and by the internal social, economic, and political pressures.
That brings me to the last point. I would say that virtually all of the progressive changes we have seen on human rights in China have originated within China but have been supported by quiet help from abroad. When there is public pressure from abroad, the response of both the government and many people in China is essentially to close off discussion and say don't lecture us. But where there are needs that are identified domestically, and where Canada and other counterparts are assisting in a quiet and discreet way, that has been the source of virtually all of the human rights progress. So I think that contextualized engagement is still more effective than public criticism.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
4:25 p.m.
Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual
There are two things.
One is that China's human rights infrastructure really grew out of its initial condemnation in the UN subcommittee on human rights in 1989. But once the infrastructure was built up--it was built up by the state to defend China against attacks--that then becomes a conduit for human rights norms and practices, and for human rights documents to be translated into Chinese usage.
Another example on this same score is that legislative hearings, public hearings, became part of China's practice after China joined the WTO. It was part of its WTO commitments to have public hearings on trade-related matters, but it then becomes a generalized matter in the legislative arena. That just shows you how international practice does influence China.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Paltiel.
Finally we welcome Mr. Marston to our committee. He serves on the human rights subcommittee of this standing committee. It is because of the draft report they brought forward that we are meeting here today.
Mr. Marston, welcome.
4:25 p.m.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
I won't take all of the credit for that report, Mr. Chair, but I appreciate your welcome. Thank you.
About a year ago I was in Beijing, and while I was there I had a chance to visit a workers' group that was supplying information on the rights of farm workers to them. That struck me as something I didn't expect to see. One of the opinions that was offered to me was the fact that the demise of the iron rice bowl is creating a situation of pressure, particularly in central China.
I think Canadians need to understand the message we're getting today that we only have a certain amount of influence in this circumstance. One of the suggestions I've heard is if we invest heavily in bringing up language skills in DFAIT and CIDA, that will position us well to get the attention and deliver the messages in the subtle way you're talking about.
On another point, what do you think about adding the Berne group, along with NGOs, in some form in this dialogue, whether it is through the actual dialogue or in parallel to it?
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
4:25 p.m.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
Mr. Chin was talking about Canada and international norms, and I was kind of leaning toward him.
4:25 p.m.
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Department of Political Science, York University
In the beginning, to build up the greatest room for Canadian NGOs to operate in China, it would be important to set up ways in which those NGOs could interact with the Chinese side in a way that builds trust and confidence--to create the room for them to operate in. You'd want to think through very clearly who the partners would be on the Chinese side.
When they're receiving, the Chinese government will probably have some organizations, such as what they call CANGO, the China association for NGOs. Those are umbrella organizations that we historically haven't taken seriously, but they've actually morphed in some interesting ways over the last 15 years. They've taken on some new roles as they compete with more autonomous NGOs, if you want to call them that. So this is the Chinese-sanctioned umbrella entity.
So in the initial phase we'd want to think through how to create the right partnership arrangements so that those Canadian NGOs could operate where there's some confidence and trust on the Chinese side. But then we'd have a phase-in strategy to begin to create more room for independent or autonomous types of rights promotion.
4:25 p.m.
Professor of Law and Director of the Institute of Asian Research, Director of Chinese Legal Studies, Centre for Asian Legal Studies, University of British Columbia
Thank you.
Mr. Marston's question leads me to say something I hope we all can appreciate, but it might bear repeating. It is that the Government of China is not a monolithic organization that operates under one set of norms and one set of policy priorities. It is an extremely diverse set of policy competitors, and that's necessitated by the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is the only game in town. You have quite a lot of diversity in policy objectives, and there are many elements within the Chinese government that support broader attempts to expand what we would call human rights and good governance. They're doing that through a whole variety of mechanisms, including the NGO and civil society sphere.
Our task is to be as encouraging of that as we can, while at the same time not exposing the folks within the system to criticism that they are too beholden to foreign influence and foreign power. That's a very difficult balancing act, and that's why I believe more effort to cultivate links between Canadian and Chinese NGOs can be very helpful.
It needs to be structured and handled carefully, for the whole reason that we don't want to be seen as the orange revolution sort of problem in China, to which the government is extremely sensitive. Nonetheless, creating space for those civil society organizations through liaison with Canadian counterparts can be helpful, and it can actually assist those in China who are working for the kinds of governance and human rights principles and practices we all support.
4:30 p.m.
Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual
I want to point out the main reason why the Chinese government is tolerating and perhaps encouraging NGO activities. It has to do with the decline of the iron rice bowl and the lack of a social safety net in market conditions. They have called upon NGOs to fill the gaps left by a market society, and they're actively encouraging them to do the jobs the government can't do itself.
4:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Do you mean as far as the social safety net--asking the NGOs to produce some type of a fallback system?
4:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
That's interesting.
Thank you to our guests. Unfortunately, our hour has come to a conclusion. We have two other guests who we're going to hear in the next hour: Mr. Préfontaine, and Mr. Frolic.
We want to thank you very much for your comments. I sense they have helped our committee immensely. Whether you're in British Columbia or here with us today in Ottawa through this remarkable technology, we thank you. I know we've been enriched because of your testimony.
We will suspend for a few minutes to allow our guests to make their exit and the other guests to take their place.
4:34 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Committee, welcome back. In our second hour today we will hear from Mr. Daniel Préfontaine, president of the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy, University of British Columbia. We are also pleased to have with us here today Bernie Michael Frolic, professor emeritus at York University.
We want to leave a few moments for committee business. Your steering committee has met, and the minutes should have been circulated. We would like to adopt that report for sure.
Welcome to both our guests today. I know you were here for our first hour, so you've seen how we operate. We'll begin with Mr. Préfontaine.
4:35 p.m.
Daniel C. Préfontaine President, International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, members of the committee.
As President of the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform, I thank you for inviting the international centre today to share with you our experience in China and to comment on human rights and their evolution in China in the 20th century.
I will give my presentation in English. Afterwards, I will be pleased to answer your questions.
Mr. Chairman, the international centre has tabled a brief for your information and your consideration. It attempts to summarize our activities in and with China over the last 13 years, with a particular focus on human rights, rule of law, and criminal justice issues.
I have been personally involved in the centre's work during those years, and I have to tell you it's been a tremendous experience and learning curve that I've gone through.
Like many Canadians, I thought--way back in 1985, when I first went there--how could you ever possibly bring the kinds of values and things we believed in into this kind of an environment? At the outset, though, let me acknowledge that our involvement in engaging with our Chinese interlocutors, although it's been fruitful and quite an experience, has been complex and at times frustrating because of the difference in language--not being able to speak Mandarin on our part and not being able to speak French or English on their part--although as time has gone on we have been able to try to remedy some of those difficulties on both sides. So dialogue requires communication to be possible--at least in the form of good interpretation or speaking the same language--especially when it comes to human rights.
We all recognize, including our Chinese counterparts that we've met, that there are real human rights issues in China that still need to be addressed, despite all the progress that's been talked about. At the same time, what we see is a sincere and motivated interest by the Chinese we have worked with--as has been mentioned by previous speakers--who want to work in this field and want to see these changes brought about because they do not want a repetition of what their parents or their grandparents went through. They thereby want to see efforts to bring about greater respect for the rule of law and human rights.
Obviously, not everyone will agree about what these terms mean, even in our country sometimes, and, as Professor Potter has noted in his comments, even more so in the Chinese context. Based on our experiences, we believe that engagement with our Chinese counterparts in fact works reasonably well, but it needs to be enhanced and continued.
Engagement--since this word is being tossed around--means many things to different people. It's better than ignoring; it's better than repressing; and it's a form of accommodation. But engagement--and the kind of engagement such as the law reform projects we have been working on--can be viewed and should be viewed as an important element within the broader framework of Canada's foreign policy and development aid cooperation efforts.
It's my view, for what it's worth, that the Canadian objective, in terms of what we do in China, is to support legal and judicial reform as a step towards improving human rights on the basis that it's better to be in the tent and supporting than outside and objecting. Legitimate criticism, however, must be made.
First, let me say a word about the centre to give you some context. The centre was created in 1991 as an independent, not-for-profit institutional organization in Vancouver. It's officially affiliated with the United Nations under a formal agreement between the Government of Canada and the United Nations. Our mandate is quite broad-based, including the promotion of human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and good governance, and particularly to make every effort to assist those who are interested in implementing international standards, and not just international human rights standards.
We've had 17 years of experience in criminal justice reform, and we've worked in many countries, but our most significant contribution, I think, in my own mind, because I've been so closely associated with it, is the long-standing program of engagement and support to the legal judicial justice reform process in China, particularly in terms of institutional and capacity building.
When did that start? We began our pioneering and groundbreaking work in 1995, with the launch of the China-Canada criminal justice cooperation project. We started working with academic institutions, as others were doing, but in fact in the criminal justice area we were the first ones.
We were funded by the Ford Foundation, and part of the funds came from the Canadian International Development Agency, in order to provide expert input to assist the Chinese in taking a look at what it meant to apply human rights standards to their country situation, in terms of trying to amend their criminal procedures, their criminal laws, and the way they provided and wanted to provide international covenant standards.
In 1997 our program was renewed for another three years. We had a new partner besides the two academic institutions, which included the China Prison Society. They were to look at the issues that were going on in human rights in prisons, and in particular how to keep the level of incarceration down by looking at how Canadians did community corrections, if I can put it that way.
Then we moved on and had another life, if you will, in 2000, in ratification and implementation of human rights covenants. And then finally, from 2003 until last summer, we had a four-year program of implementing international standards in criminal justice.
Separate and apart from that particular program, we worked on legal aid. We were the ones who were asked by the Chinese if we would help them look at the legal aid systems of other countries and help them develop a national legal aid program. We did that, and as a result of that work, the Canadian Bar Association and IBM Canada, with CIDA as the executing agency, are implementing a legal aid system in China that has a huge number of legal aid clinics throughout the country--in the hundreds of thousands of cases that are now being dealt with. Numbers are staggering when you're dealing with the Chinese situation compared to our modest Canadian way of doing business.
Finally, we did a large program, and we are continuing that program right now, working with the Chinese prosecutors. As one of the key agencies in China, we are helping them with professionalization, capacity building, and developing new ways of having the Supreme People's Procuratorate respect international covenants and combat crime.
As has been alluded to by some of the previous speakers, we know the history of legal and judicial development in China. We have seen the amendments from the mid-1990s and since the March 2004 constitutional amendments, which enshrined--be careful with “enshrined”--the human rights as a constitutional principle. It's not the same kind of enshrinement as we have in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms or in our Constitution, but it does at least go a long way, in comparative terms, towards recognizing that it's something that should be done and respected.
In fact, from what we can see from the people we're working with, the Chinese government is making international human rights standards a priority as one way to help China assume its place in the community of nations in the 21st century. However, they have lots of problems, and with the free market economy, public corruption, economic crime, computer crime, narcotics trafficking, all of these things are becoming more prevalent than they were 20 or 30 years ago, or even 10 years ago. It's a big obstacle in some respects to implementing the recently enacted legal and judicial reforms, which they are working on.
Corruption has now become the number one priority for the Supreme People's Procuratorate. In our project, in supporting their work, we have been doing all kinds of information exchange, study tours, and providing them with different approaches on how to deal with the two aspects of corruption--the prevention side as well as the enforcement side. Much needs to be done on the prevention side. The prevention side needs a lot more work.
I think it would be important for me to mention some of the significant reforms that we have seen take place, which we feel we have been able to influence in some way. The improvements to the death penalty review system, which have caused a significant reduction in the number of capital punishment cases, have been quite extraordinary. As far as the numbers go, they count one way, Amnesty International counts another way, and we can count other ways as well. The death penalty still exists, but the numbers and the kinds of cases for which it's being used have been reduced.
Increased protection of the rights of the accused in pre-trial investigations with the new supervisory powers of the procurators, the prosecutors over the police, are quite significant. The introduction of anti-torture rules, exclusionary rules of evidence, and the videotaping of interrogations--I've witnessed them myself--are quite impressive. Perhaps some of our police could go as far. You can't do everything, but you do most of them.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Mr. Préfontaine, can I just interrupt for a moment? We're two minutes over the ten-minute timeframe. If you could summarize and conclude, we'll go to the next....
4:45 p.m.
President, International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy
Sure. I figured that was probably going to happen because there's too much stuff. That's why I gave you the brief.