Publicly Press Beijing on Crackdown<\/p>\n
OCTOBER 27, 2016 12:50AM EDT<\/p>\n
(Paris) \u2013 On his visit to China<\/a>, France<\/a>\u2019s Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault should publicly call for an end to Beijing\u2019s crackdown on human rights defenders and lawyers, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the foreign minister<\/a>. Ayrault is scheduled to arrive in China on October 29, 2016.<\/p>\n \u201cOn past visits, French leaders have relied on vague statements about the need to respect human rights principles, but not criticized China\u2019s violations of law,\u201d said B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Jeannerod<\/a>, France director.<\/p>\n Under President Xi Jinping, the outlook for fundamental human rights in China has grown dire.<\/p>\n In July 2015, more than 300 human rights lawyers and legal activists across the country were detained<\/a> in a nationwide sweep, and over 20 remain in detention<\/a>. Chinese authorities continue to adopt highly abusive laws on issues ranging from cybersecurity to domestic civil society groups, and refuse to consider the grievances of ethnic minority and religious communities.<\/p>\n Foreign Minister Ayrault and other French officials should publicly call for an end to the civil society crackdown and for the release of wrongfully imprisoned individuals, including Liu Xiaobo<\/a> and Ilham Tohti<\/a>. Ayrault should also challenge his Chinese counterparts over China\u2019s use of the death penalty and its abductions of foreign nationals.<\/p>\n \u201cFrance and Foreign Minister Ayrault should join the growing international chorus of nations speaking out publicly, and do so in a way that people across China can hear,\u201d Jeannerod said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Publicly Press Beijing on Crackdown<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-3102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3102"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=3102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}