By Jerome A. Cohen
Here are the remarks that I delivered at today's event, the 5th China Human Rights Lawyer Day, hosted by several US and Taiwanese organizations. I am honored that I was asked to participate in the program, yet I am sad that I cannot be more encouraging than last year about the prospects for China’s human rights lawyers and other Chinese advocates for political and civil liberties in their country.
Of course, I again want to try to rally China’s beleaguered human rights activists and their many foreign supporters to keep the faith. We must not lessen our support for all those engaged in the great and historic effort to nourish the development of justice, due process, government under law and freedoms of expression in China, even while those of us outside China strive to meet similar challenges in our own societies.
Yet we owe each other and our shared cause the duty of candor. Illusions and self-deception cannot serve us. We are engaged in a long-run struggle. The six years since the start of the tragic 709 crackdown are a mere speck in China’s long history. Even the 70 years since the establishment of the People’s Republic is but a short interval. It is important to note that these most recent seven decades have been marked by major swings in the pendulum of political development. The current Xi Jinping era is especially depressing to those who hope for a democratic dawn or at least a more pluralistic and freer country that offers protection to individual rights. But change will come again, as many of us predicted even during the darkest days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I recommend that everyone inside and outside China see the so-called film comedy “THE DEATH OF STALIN”. As the nineteenth century poet Swinburne wrote: “No life lives forever”.
In the interim, what should we be doing?
1. Certainly we should give all the support we can to those who, despite all obstacles, continue to engage in the struggle for the protection of human rights in China. We should continue to let them know that we greatly appreciate the risks and suffering they endure and the contributions that they are managing to make.
2. We need to do much more to inform the world about the true situation of China’s human rights lawyers and the extent to which the PRC’s criminal process serves as totalitarianism’s major weapon of repression and injustice.
3. We must provide full support to those Chinese human rights lawyers who escape from China, and we must benefit from the accurate information and advice that they bring us.
4. We must attempt to persuade UN institutions, other international organizations, foreign governments and legislatures, NGOs, the media, bar associations, law firms, law schools, and individual lawyers, judges, officials, scholars and students to focus on the suppression of China’s human rights lawyers and to maximize pressures to alleviate their persecution. Every day in many fora we have to keep asking questions such as: Is the great lawyer Gao Zhisheng dead or alive? Is the great civic reformer Xu Zhiyong again suffering torture while imprisoned?
We must not succumb to compassion fatigue. Indeed, if we increase our efforts, perhaps next year’s 709 conference will be convened in a more optimistic atmosphere.
The link to the video of today's program is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJY_WNtPcOs