Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to China (October 28 - 30)

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has sent an appeal to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, asking her to use her visit to the People’s Republic of China to demand the implementation of a functioning rule of law, as promised. The human rights organization reminded the Chancellor that it is especially human rights activists and lawyers who are still suffering from state oppression in China. Thus, there have been more than 1,900 documented arrests of human rights activists since President Xi Jinping took power in March 2013. “This unprecedented arbitrariness must come to an end! Germany’s interests are affected as well, since German companies who operate on the Chinese market must be able to rely on a rule of law – as well as the local human rights activists,” said the STP’s China-expert, Ulrich Delius, in Göttingen on Tuesday.

The Chancellor will be visiting China from October 28 to 30, 2015. The focus of her visit will be on assessing the implementation of the bilateral action plan which was agreed by the two governments in October 2014. The 28-page-long document places special emphasis on the aspect of consolidating the rule of law.

Since July 2014, more than 300 lawyers have been arbitrarily arrested – a measure of intimidation because of their human rights activities in China. At least 23 of them are still in custody, including lawyer Zhang Kai. He defended a group of Christians who protested against the destruction of their churches in Zhejiang province, where more than 1,200 crosses were torn from officially recognized churches since 2013. Zhang was arrested on August 25, 2015, and sentenced to six months in prison in an unfair trial.

“If China were to act according to a rule of law, Beijing would also have to grant the Muslim Uyghurs, the Buddhist Tibetans, the Christians and the Falun Gong practitioners their constitutional right to freedom of religion,” says the letter the STP addressed to Merkel. However, the arbitrariness in Tibet and Xinjiang/East Turkestan continues, and Tibetans and Uyghurs who dare to claim their rights are persecuted. Thus, Khenpo Karma Tsewang – the Buddhist abbot of a Tibetan monastery in Qinghai province – was sentenced to half a year in prison for “leaking state secrets”. The abbot had been very active in the fields of environment protection and saving the Tibetan language, which is why the Chinese security authorities labeled him as a threat.

Also, Ilham Tohti, an Uyghur professor of Economics, is serving a life sentence in Xinjiang, after being sentenced in an unfair trial. He had advocated for more understanding between the Uyghurs and the majority population of the Han Chinese.

Header Photo: Todenhoff via Flickr