Uighurs

1NC ShellThe Uighurs are a terrorist group due to squo human rights abuses in china Chung, 02 (Chien Peng, Political Science Professor at Lingnan University, “China’s ‘War on Terror’: September 11 and Uighur Separatism” https://www.ln.edu.hk/polsci/staff-chung.php, 6-7/16 CCC)

In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States, China has launched its own "war on terror." Beijing now labels as terrorists those who are fighting for an independent state in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, which the separatists call "Eastern Turkestan." The government considers these activists part of a network of international Islamic terror , with funding from the Middle East, training in Pakistan, and combat experience in Chechnya and Afghanistan. In fact, separatist violence in Xinjiang is neither new nor driven primarily by outsiders. The region's Uighurs, most of whom practice Sufi Islam and speak a Turkic language, have long had their national ambitions frustrated by Beijing. The latest wave of Uighur separatism has been inspired not by Osama bin Laden but by the unraveling of the Soviet Union, as militants seek to emulate the independence gained by some Muslim communities in

Central Asia. For a decade now, Xinjiang has been rocked by demonstrations, bombings, and political assassinations. According to a recent government report, Uighur separatists were responsible for 200 attacks between 1990 and 2001 , causing 162 deaths and injuring more than 440 people. In the largest single incident, in 1997, as many as 100 people may have been killed during a pro-independence uprising in the town of Ili, with the government and the separatists blaming each other for the fatalities. These incidents have occurred despite the best efforts of the Chinese authorities to suppress them. As part of their continuing "strike hard" campaign against crime, for example, Chinese police recently reported the arrest of 166 separatist "terrorists" and other "major criminals" in a series of raids carried out in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. The separatists have accused the regime of resorting to arbitrary arrest,

torture, detention without public trial, and summary execution. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has alleged that members of a shadowy " Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement" have obtained funds and training from al Qaeda. As the security environment in Xinjiang grows increasingly tense, the conflict shows just how complicated such struggles can be, and how inadequate purely repressive approaches are in dealing with them.

US engagement with china exonerates Chinese human rights abuses against uighurs and leads to uighur terrorist activity Sun, 9 (Yan, Political Science professor for City University of New York, “What Should China Do About The Uighurs” http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/what-should-china-do-about-the-uighurs/?_r=0=, 7/8/09 CCC) After arriving at the home of my parents in Chongqing on July 7, I asked my mother how many relatives we still had in Xinjiang and how they were doing lately. Ten families of close relatives, she said, and several more distant ones. Some were born and raised in Xinjiang, but the majority migrated there in the 1960s and 1970s from the Sichuan countryside. The sole reason was to get out of the poor farmland and have a chance at becoming urban residents. They were introduced to Xinjiang by an aunt who was assigned there in the 1950s but had managed to bring her family back to Sichuan in the 1980s. My relatives mostly see “outside forces” as the main reason for the latest as well as other riots in Xinjiang in recent years. I scrambled to reach some of them by phone and talk to them candidly about the issues that are often cited in the Western media as responsible for growing ethnic divide and tensions between the Uighur and Han Chinese . Some of my cited reasons took them by surprise; others made them laugh. With their decades of life and work in an austere region, I have little reason to dispute them. As a social scientist, it is fascinating for me to learn about their perspective on the deeper roots of the recent riots. After all, they were supposed to be the very source and targets of local grievance. Without any need to repeat government accounts to me, my relatives mostly see “outside forces” as the main reason for the latest as well as other riots in Xinjiang in recent years . Citing long-term good friendship with local Muslims, they are hard-pressed to think of divisions serious enough to cause deadly riots. Rather, they claim to have seen outside influences at work from their own experience, e.g., money for underground mosques where mullahs engage in inciting rhetoric, for “terrorist groups” that make explosives and bombs, or for restless Muslim youths who stage trouble on the streets. They

also see a pattern of Uighur separatist forces imitating the tactics of Tibetan exiles, namely, phrasing issues in terms that appeal to Western sensibilities, such as religious freedom, cultural and linguistic preservation, ethnic equality or territorial autonomy. But aren’t there problems in these areas? My relatives were unanimous in their view that state policies are already tilted in favor of local ethnics. Freedom of religion? My relatives see the state restrictions are justifiable: no mosques for those under 18 because they are not mature enough to have good judgment, and no mosque attendance for those holding government jobs. The state does send an (Uighur) official as a liaison with the mosques on a weekly basis, but again this is seen as justifiable since the state funds helped with their construction and to pay the mullahs’ salaries. Why not let them fund on their own? The answer is that outside religious forces would otherwise fund them. Having read about how foreign-financed madrassahs spring up and spread in western Pakistan, I am hard-pressed to pass judgment here. How about the imposition of Chinese language instruction in schools? This was news to my relatives. They grew up attending separate schools from their Uighur peers, where different languages were used in instruction. Some Uighurs chose to attend Han Chinese schools for career benefits. Only since 2005 has bilingual education been introduced in public schools in Xinjiang. Most technical colleges use Chinese in instruction, because of available resources, while colleges for ethnic nationalities instruct in minority languages. Rather than seeing bilingual education as forced assimilation, my relatives see it as a good skill to have in the job market, because many modern-sector jobs will involve interaction with Han Chinese in and out of Xinjiang. For their part, my Xinjiang cousins speak enough Uighur to communicate with Uighurs on a daily basis, and tell me that they live more like Uighurs than Han Chinese, enjoying mutton more than pork. What about widened income gaps between Han Chinese and Uighur Muslims in the market economy? My relatives cite different attitudes toward education, achievement and life. This is where some “racist” assessments may be found, if they may be so-called: nomadic traditions do not value sending kids to schools, but rather roaming around or bathing in the sun; nor do they prioritize professional and material pursuits like the Han Chinese, or hard work or long-term planning for this world, but rather satisfaction in the spiritual world, etc. These are the contrasts I have learned in Western social sciences — conflicts between pre-modern and modern values, religious and secular cultures, or an achievement and non-achievement ethic. So it is hard for me to pass judgment here as well except to urge Han Chinese to loosen up and enjoy life a little as our ethnic brothers do. What about the squeezing of Uighurs in their own native land by growing Han presence? Is that occupation or colonialism? These lines usually shocked my relatives. One aunt, a college professor who spent three decades in Khotan of southern Xinjiang, gave me a history lesson about how Xinjiang came under Chinese control in the Han Dynasty in the 200s B.C. and remained so on and off till the Manchu Dynasty finally consolidated Chinese rule in the 1770s. Xinjiang was loose whenever China was weak internally and its rulers were preoccupied elsewhere. But successive rulers always reasserted control and sovereignty. Another aunt who had lived in a Tibetan region called the Chinese nation a melting pot of different ethnic groups over millenniums. Citing our own ancestors who had migrated to Sichuan generations back, my mother recalls her grandmother as one with white skin and yellow hair, possible of Turkic origin herself from western China. Are there government policies on minority regions responsible for increasing ethnic tensions? Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly for someone familiar with America’s ethnic politics), some of my relatives fault the government’s preferential policies for helping to enhance ethnic identity and entitlement for minorities. Uighurs with disciplinary problems or criminal offenses are treated leniently, they say. In matters of employment, appointment and promotion in the public sector, Uighurs may be preferred over (perceived) more qualified Han candidates. “Reverse discrimination” in college admissions and population policies are other areas of Han complaints. While Han Chinese can have only one child, Uighurs receive honorary and monetary rewards for stopping at three, along with yearly bonuses. Whether legitimate or not, such complaints make it difficult for Han Chinese to appreciate Uighur grievances. Do they think the World Uighur Congress and its exiled leader, Rebiya Radeer, were behind the recent riots? My older relatives from Xinjiang recalled Soviet instigations of Uighur separatism in the 30s and during the cold war, so they said they would not be surprised by any outside support for the W.U.C. or Radeer. Younger relatives point to the U.S. — not the U.S. per se but to the exploitation of U.S. apprehension over anything Beijing does and of U.S. sympathies for any group that Beijing opposes. The real point of staging riots inside China, they assert, is that they enable the exiled groups to survive and thrive. So they expect such riots for years to come.

Conflict causes Uighur terrorist lashout Dickey, 16 (Lauren, PhD in war studies writer for the Council on Foreign Relations , “Global Conflict Tracker” http://www.cfr.org/global/global-conflict-tracker/p32137#!/conflict/uighur-conflict-in-china, 7/8/09 CCC) China’s security force crackdown on the ethnic Uighur minority intensified after the 2009 riots in Xinjiang region’s capital, Urumqi, which resulted in nearly 200 dead and more than 1,700 injured, according to Chinese officials. In 2014, China once again stepped up its security presence in Xinjiang following numerous knife and

bomb attacks by separatists. Chinese authorities have also conducted mass arrests of Uighurs, including the high-profile academic Ilham Tohti in January 2014. A recent August 2015 bomb attack in Bangkok may be linked to Uighur militants, which if confirmed, would mark a rare external spillover of Uighur-related terrorism outside Chinese borders . The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in Western China accounts for one-sixth of China’s land and is home to approximately twenty million people from thirteen major ethnic groups.

The Uighurs—a Muslim and ethnically Turkic population—are the largest ethnic group in the region, numbering around ten million. Tensions between

China’s Uighur population and the Han Chinese ethnic group in the Xinjiang region in Western China have resulted in demonstrations and acts of violence and terrorism since the 1990s . While Uighurs claim to experience brutal repression in China, which fuels extremism, Beijing denies that it propagates any cultural or ethnic discrimination. Predominantly Uighur separatist groups, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) reportedly

founded by Hasan Mahsum, a Uighur from Xinjiang, have committed acts of violence against both government officials and civilians. The violence has generally intensified after a large influx of Han people to Xinjiang over the past two decades . Believed to have ties to al-Qaeda, ETIM has been sanctioned by the UN Security Council’s al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee and by the United States under Executive Order 13224 , which both require freezing assets and denying material support to individuals and organizations with connections to terrorists . However, ETIM has not been officially designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. A radicalized Uighur population poses direct terrorist risks to China, as well as potentially bolstering support for other terrorist groups that directly target the United States. Al-Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State have threatened jihad in Xinjiang in support of the Uighurs and Chinese officials have estimated that three hundred Uighurs have already joined the self-proclaimed Islamic State. The Islamic State is now actively trying to recruit more Uighurs by translating its propaganda into the Uighur language.

Uighurs will be able to access nuclear materials from multiple locations – a nuclear terror attack is likelyZhang 14 [Hui, Project on Managing the Atom Kennedy School of Government Harvard University, “REDUCING THE DANGER OF NUCLEAR TERRORISM IN CHINA”, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/ChinaNT-INMM2014_hzhang.pdf, no date given – last cited date was 2014]

The Security Risks to China’s Nuclear Facilities and Materials While the probability of a nuclear bomb detonation is lower than that of a dirty bomb, the consequences of a nuclear blast are much larger than those of a radiological dispersal device. Therefore, the overall risk posed by a

nuclear blast may be higher. In fact, no country, in particular those that have nuclear weapons or weapon-usable fissile materials, can ignore the real and urgent threat of nuclear terrorism. China cannot and should not exclude the possibility of outsider and insider threats. Insider threats. The possibility of an insider theft of nuclear materials cannot be ruled out, particularly as China continues to transform into a market-oriented society and becomes increasingly corrupt. Certain Chinese experts argue that the significant changes in Chinese society over the last decades could increase crime rates , perhaps raising the probability of theft and

smuggling. 28 Many experts believe that the more severe the corruption in a country is, the higher the potential for insider theft of materials and the greater the need for rigorous nuclear materials security measures .29 The risk of an insider threat is perhaps the most difficult to deal with, because insiders are those authorized to access areas containing nuclear materials. They are knowledgeable about operations, rules, policies, and regulations concerning nuclear materials. Insiders are highly trained on handling nuclear materials. They have the opportunity to understand how to defeat, test, or circumvent safety and security systems and distract other insiders and guards. One or more of these individuals could take advantage of access to perform acts of theft or sabotage, and potentially aid terrorists. Insiders could work with outsiders, other employees, on-site personnel, or off-site personnel. HEU and separated

plutonium in China’s civilian nuclear sector, in particular, could be especially vulnerable to insiders. For instance, fresh and spent HEU fuel is present at research reactors, which are located at institutes that, because of a shortage of funding, are not as well-controlled and guarded as military sites, while some of the older ones rely on outdated security and control systems. Some Chinese experts argue against stricter standards on the grounds that they will cost more. Bulk-processing facilities in particular—plants that conduct fuel fabrication, reprocessing, and enrichment—tend to have limited financial resources, often causing operators to give security a low priority. China’s civilian pilot reprocessing plant is also concerned. The plant was not designed for maximum security when construction began in 1995. It shares some facilities with a previous military reprocessing plant that was not designed with an up-

to-date material protection, control, and accounting system. And the amount of unaccounted-for material at the plant is higher than is considered acceptable. Outsider threats . Outsider terrorist attacks may someday pose a real threat to China’s

nuclear facilities. As the Chinese government has emphasized, the terrorist forces of the East Turkestan movement have long been recipients of training, financial assistance and support from international terrorist groups, including core al-Qaeda.30 Indeed, concern in Beijing about the threat of terrorism has been rising. China has been the victim of terrorism and faces various terrorist threats.31 Its recent national defense White Paper states,

“China still faces multiple and complicated security threats and challenges. The threats posed by ‘three forces,’ namely, terrorism, separatism, and extremism, are on the rise.” 32 China faces a growing threat from extremists in the predominantly Muslim Uighur community who want to form a separate state called East Turkestan. In 2003, China's Ministry of Public Security identified several associated terrorist organizations, including the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the East Turkestan Liberation Organization (ETLO), the World Uyghur Congress, and the East Turkistan Information Center.33 ETIM has claimed responsibility for over 200 acts of terrorism between 1990 and 2001.34 The group has a close relationship with al-Qaeda, which has provided training in Afghanistan and funding . Several of the terrorist groups have been involved in the recent crisis in Syria. “Their aim is not only troop training, but also acceptance and support from other

terrorist groups, so as to be able to solicit help in the future.”35 Over the last seven years, members of the East Turkestan movement have carried out more than a dozen attacks, many on government buildings and police stations and most involving explosives and grenades, resulting in numerous deaths. Moreover, China’s neighbors in Central Asia and Pakistan have served as safe havens for members of the movement. These countries are also home to a high level of international terrorist activity and are centers of nuclear smuggling and proliferation activities. It is possible that East Turkestan extremists could acquire fissile material or nuclear weapons from their bases in these areas, which they could also use to plan and launch attacks.

Terrorism causes extinction  Alexander 3 (Yonah, Inter-University for Terrorism Studies Director, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/aug/27/20030827-084256-8999r/,  AD: 6/27/10) Last week's brutal suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have once again illustrate d dramatically that the international community faile d, thus far at least, to understand the magnitude and implications of the terrorist threats to the very survival of civilization itself. Even the United States and Israel have for decades tended to regard terrorism as a mere tactical nuisance or irritant rather than a critical strategic challenge to their national security concerns. It is not surprising, therefore, that on September 11, 2001, Americans were stunned by the unprecedented tragedy of 19 al Qaeda terrorists striking a devastating blow at the center of the nation's commercial and military powers. Likewise, Israel and its citizens, despite the collapse of the Oslo Agreements of 1993 and numerous acts of terrorism triggered by the second intifada that began almost three years ago, are still "shocked" by each suicide attack at a time of intensive diplomatic efforts to revive the moribund peace process through the now revoked cease-fire arrangements [hudna]. Why are the United States and Israel, as well as scores of other countries affected by the universal nightmare of modern terrorism surprised by new terrorist "surprises"? There are many reasons, including misunderstanding of the manifold specific factors that contribute to terrorism's expansion, such as lack of a universal definition of terrorism, the religionization of politics, double standards of morality, weak punishment of terrorists, and the exploitation of the media by terrorist propaganda and psychological warfare. Unlike their historical counterparts, contemporary terrorists have introduced a new scale of violence in terms of conventional and unconventional threats and impact. The internationalization and brutalization of current and future terrorism make it clear we have entered an Age of Super Terrorism [e.g. biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear and cyber] with its serious implications concerning national, regional and global security concerns.

2NC

XT UQUS classifies Uighurs as terrorists responding to human rights abusesBBC News, 14 (“Why is there tension between china and the Uighers” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-26414014, 9/26/14 CCC) Security was increased and many Uighurs detained as suspects. But violence rumbled on as right groups increasingly pointed to tight control by

Beijing. In June 2012, six Uighurs reportedly tried to hijack a plane from Hotan to Urumqi before they were overpowered by passengers and crew. There was bloodshed in April 2013 and in June that year, 27 people died in Shanshan county after police opened fire on what state media described as a mob armed with knives attacking local government buildings Establishing facts about these incidents is difficult, because foreign journalists' access to the region is tightly controlled, but in recent months, there appears to have been a shift towards larger-scale incidents where citizens have become the target, particularly in Xinjiang. At least 31 people were killed

and more than 90 suffered injuries in May 2014 when two cars crashed through an Urumqi market and explosives were tossed into the crowd. China called it a "violent terrorist incident". It followed a bomb and knife attack at Urumqi's south railway station in April, which killed three and injured 79 others. In July, authorities said a knife-wielding gang attacked a police station and government offices in Yarkant, leaving 96 dead. The imam of China's largest mosque, Jume Tahir, was stabbed to death days later. In September about 50 died in blasts in Luntai county outside police stations, a market and a shop. Details of both incidents are unclear and activists have contested some accounts

of incidents in state media. Chinese officials blamed the attack at Tiananmen Square on separatists from Xinjiang. Some violence has also spilled out of Xinjiang. A March stabbing spree in Kunming in Yunnan province that killed 29 people was blamed on Xinjiang separatists, as was an October 2013 incident where a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. In response to the latest slew of attacks, the authorities have launched what they call a "year-long campaign against terrorism", stepping up security in Xinjiang and conducting more military drills in the region. There have also been reports of mass sentencings and arrests of several "terror groups". Chinese state media have reported long lists of people convicted of extremist activity and in some cases, death sentences. High-profile Uighur academic, Ilham Tohti was detained and later charged in September 2014 on charges of separatism., sparking international criticism. Shock and anger after Kunming brutality China tries to block Xinjiang blast memorial Who's to

blame? China also blamed Xinjiang separatists for the brutal attack in March 2014 at Kunming station China has often blamed ETIM - the East Turkestan Islamic Movement - or people inspired by ETIM for violent incidents both in Xinjiang and beyond the region's borders. ETIM is said to want to establish an independent East Turkestan in China. The US State Department in 2006 said ETIM is "the most militant of the ethnic Uighur separatist groups ". The scope of ETIM's activities remains unclear with some questioning the group's capacity to organise serious acts of extremism. ETIM has not said it was behind any of the attacks. Chinese authorities said the Turkestan Islamic Party - which it says is synonymous with ETIM - released a video backing the Kunming attack, however. With the recent apparent escalation in Xinjiang-related violence, the question of who and what is driving it is likely to attract greater scrutiny.

Chinese sponsored genocide and human rights violations against Uighurs promotes terrorismSiddiqui, 15 (Usaid, writer for PolicyMic, Aslan, and Mondoweiss, “The ethnic roots of chinas Uighur crisis” http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/7/the-ethnic-roots-of-chinas-uighur-crisis.html, 7/21/15 CCC)

Last month Chinese authorities in the predominantly Uighur province of Xinjiang reportedly ordered civil servants, students and teachers not to fast and restaurants to remain open during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Similar allegations were made last year. Unsurprisingly, the report was met with widespread outcry outside China. The global protests even forced the Chinese Foreign Ministry to address the allegations in press conference with reporters on July 6. “Uighur is one of the 56 ethnic minorities in China. More than 10 million Uighur Turks are living happily and peacefully,” ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters in Beijing, denying the ban. “These people have the freedom of religion under the Chinese Constitution.” There is little independent reporting from Xinjiang, but China routinely denies allegations of religious persecution against its Uighur population. The ruling Communist Party is officially

atheist, and therefore some implicit bias is to be expected. But it is erroneous to conclude that the Uighur crisis is solely religious. The Uighur nationalists’ desire for more autonomy has long been at odds with China’s centralization policy. If

anything, Chinese authorities are using the “war on terrorism” as a cover to demolish the Uighur people’s nationalist aspirations. The Uighur struggle for self-rule arguably dates back to the 18th century, when the Qing dynasty conquered the Xinjiang province and incorporated it into China. Uighur nationalists organized several uprisings against the dynasty, which ruled China until the early 20th century. In 1949, Mao Zedong’s forces thwarted Uighur aspirations by imposing total control over Xinjiang, setting off

the protracted tensions that have characterized the Uighur-state relations to date. The Chinese government often blames violent episodes in the troubled province on Uighur separatists, attributing at least 200 violent incidents, including bombings and assassinations, to them from 1990 to 2001. But the violence and Uighur demonstrations have decreased since the late 1990s. Tensions escalated again in 2008, when a military police unit in Kashgar in western China was attacked during

the Beijing Summer Olympics. The government blamed the Uighurs for the attack. Members of the Uighur diaspora contend that the Chinese government is committing genocide against their people . For example, the U.S.-based Uighur Human Rights Project, which advocates for human rights in East Turkestan, says close to 700 Uighurs were killed from 2013 to 2014. “Although these numbers should not be considered definitive … they are indicative of deterioration in security conditions since Xi Jinping became Chinese president,” the organization said earlier this year. In addition to the routine scapegoating for violence, the Uighur people have had their civil rights seriously compromised. Last year Georgetown University professor James Millward wrote that most state institutions in Xinjiang allegedly require Han ethnicity as a condition for employment. He added that the state interferes in the Uighur community’s cultural practices — for example through teaching only Mandarin in schools and restrictions on weddings, funerals and pilgrimage, or hajj.

XT LUS engagement with China increases terror attacks from Uighur militants – the US refuses to cooperate with China on terrorHundman and Zhu 15 [Eric Hundman, doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Chicago, and Wei Zhu, program associate with the religion program at the Social Science Research Council in New York, “Is China a Credible Partner In Fighting Terror?”, Foreign Policy, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/24/china-islamic-state-terrorism-war-beijing-paris-us/, November]

In between offering condolences and expressing solidarity in light of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, Chinese officials had some pointed comments for

those in the West. Chinese President Xi Jinping also strongly criticized the double standard over how terrorism is treated compared to terrorism in the West and emphasized the crucial need for international cooperation against terrorism, linking the Paris attacks to the similar attacks in Xinjiang. While the Chinese government has usually followed an insular approach to domestic issues , it has consistently pushed to connect the unrest in Xinjiang with the Western-led war on terror and extremism. There are certainly some disaffected Uyghurs joining the likes of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State ; a recent Islamic State video, for example, highlights its Chinese Uyghur members and includes some harsh words for Chinese infidels. But while the actual extent of those links are debatable, the government has taken a heavy-handed approach to clamp down on any potential subversive activity in Xinjiang, particularly given the instability in neighboring Afghanistan. In light of the Paris attacks, and the death of Chinese citizen Fan Jinghui at hands of

the Islamic State, such policies may intensify. But the Chinese government is paying a price for its opaque ways: Western nations have been skeptical and sometimes dismissive of terrorism in China, accusing the government of exaggerating those risks. The Paris attacks are only the latest reminder to many Chinese people that while the

Chinese expressed solidarity with France and denounced the perpetrators, the West has been more reluctant to express similar sentiments when such attacks (like the 2014 Kunming attacks) happen in China. The fear and terror caused by these attacks are real, as are the anger and frustration shared by many Chinese at how the West views attacks by Uyghur militants; that is, without sufficient concern and seriousness. The Chinese government has long tied the unrest in Xinjiang to the wider war on terror, but these latest remarks are the most vocal yet, strongly rebuking those that fail to recognize Xinjiang as another frontier in that struggle. At a time when many countries around the world are grappling with the extent and threat of Islamist extremism and terror, Chinese officials want to make clear the legitimacy of their country’s domestic terrorism problems and the importance (and effectiveness) of their policies, both through official statements and state-run media. China is decisively on the same page as Western nations in the struggle against militant Islamist groups. But already in uneasy collaboration with Russia in Syria, will Western nations accept China as another partner if it means compromises elsewhere — such as treating Xinjiang as a legitimate theater of terrorism? Will the threat of groups like the Islamic State necessitate a true global response with all five permanent members of the UN

Security Council together as a united front? China has made its goals and interests clear, and the working relationship between China and the West in the war on terror will be an increasingly important topic moving forward. Eric

Hundman, doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Chicago: The question of whether China can be a credible partner for the United States is critical — China’s credibility not only will impact the effectiveness of any efforts to cooperate with the United States on terrorism, it also will affect cooperation in other areas where the two share interests, such as climate change, territorial disputes, and trade. However, China’s credibility is not just about China’s actions — it also rests on U.S. perceptions of those actions. In the case of fighting terror, these perceptions hinge on the degrees to which (1) the two countries agree on the nature of terrorism and (2) the United States trusts that China’s ultimate intentions are benign. Given increasing concerns about China’s rise, prospects that the United States will view China as a credible partner in fighting terror appear dim. Small highlights the first reason the United States is unlikely to see China as credible when he notes that China’s unwillingness to draw clear lines between terrorism and other forms of resistance inhibits cooperation between the two — the United States is not convinced that it would be helping China to pursue targets that, from a U.S. perspective, can legitimately be deemed “terrorists .” Naming a terrorist involves a fundamentally political judgment of legitimacy. Everyone thus agrees that

terrorists are bad, but agreement on how to identify and handle them is more elusive. Disagreement about the nature of

terrorism makes China less credible to the United States as a partner, both because agreement about how to fight terror becomes harder, and also because the ways in which the two sides disagree link the politics of terrorism to other important issues in the U.S.-China relationship. In other words, because partnering with China to fight terror implicates other issues that loom large in the relationship for the United States — especially human rights , China’s military modernization, and China’s increasing assertiveness — the question of how much the United States trusts China’s intentions in general also affects whether China can be seen as a credible partner in fighting terro r. One lens through which to assess this kind of trust is the security dilemma, a concept from international relations theory that highlights how China’s defensive, security-seeking actions — including anti-terror efforts — could be seen by the United States as threatening. Recent work on the security dilemma in East Asia indicates that the United States increasingly doubts that China’s ultimate intentions are benign. This kind of uncertainty about intentions not only intensifies U.S. concerns that cooperation with China will be ineffective in fighting terror, it also foregrounds concerns that such cooperation could support China’s pursuit of undesirable goals in other areas. For instance, in the presence of worries about China’s ultimate intentions, cooperating with the Chinese domestic security apparatus is more likely to be seen as enabling an increase in state power that could ultimately threaten the United States. If the United States were to become confident that China did not seek to challenge it, this kind of worry would diminish, and China would be seen as a much more credible partner in the fight against terror.

China so far has been unwilling to take actions that plausibly could diminish such worries in the United States, and even if it did so, the United States might perceive such actions in unpredictable ways. So long as negative views of China continue to predominate Stateside and differences of opinion about fighting terror persist, therefore, it seems unlikely the United States will see China as a credible partner on this issue.

Supportive US- China relations prevent an end to Chinese human rights abuses to Uighurs Seytoff, 14 (Alim, President of the Uyghur American Association, “Freedom-Loving Uighurs Demand Dignity in China” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alim-a-seytoff/china-uighurs_b_5589130.html, 7/16/14 CCC) Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never fostered peaceful and amicable relationships with the indigenous populations of historically non-Chinese territories. They are the Uighur people of East Turkestan (also known as Xinjiang), and the Tibetan and Mongolian peoples, conquered by the Manchu Qing Empire during its nearly three-century rule of China.

Communist China’s policy toward these territories and peoples has been an intensified continuation of colonial rule. After 65 years of Chinese rule in their homelands, the relationships between the Chinese authorities and the Uighurs, Tibetans and Mongolians have become more contentious than ever . China’s denunciation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way” of accepting Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, the latest violation of the “One Country Two Systems” promise to Hong Kong, and in East Turkestan, the arrest of moderate Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, have practically burned the bridge of peaceful political resolution. Mr. Tohti, a professor at Beijing’s Central Nationalities University, has been held incommunicado for

the past six months for peacefully advocating dialogue and reconciliation between the Chinese and Uighur peoples, and urging Chinese leaders to respect the legitimate rights of the Uighurs. Of the three indigenous peoples, the Uighurs have proved the most resistant to China’s repressive rule. Since the Uighurs are Muslim, the September 11 terror attacks in the United States provided China with a

perfect opportunity to repackage its heavy-handed repression in East Turkestan as a “fight against terrorism.” Cashing in on the justified fear of Islamic terrorism by Western governments, China has been on a global public relations crusade demonizing Uighur people’s legitimate political demands as “Islamic terrorism.” While the CCP

had paid lip service to self-rule in the early days of Chinese communist rule and declared ethnic “autonomous regions” for the Uighurs , Tibetans and Mongolians, these indigenous peoples have never enjoyed any autonomy since Chinese officials wield all the military, political and economic powers . On the contrary, China has stationed large numbers of military forces in East Turkestan, Tibet and Southern Mongolia in order to crush any sign of unrest for self rule, strengthened its security apparatus to closely monitor and crackdown the political activities of indigenous groups, exploited their abundant natural resources, and flooded these colonies with millions of Chinese settlers to solidify its control, and eventually marginalize and assimilate the non-Chinese peoples. China’s strategy has been three-pronged: first, denounce the indigenous peoples’ legitimate and peaceful political demands as “separatism” and demonize the respectable political figures among them; second, deploy security forces to suppress protest, and accuse the indigenous peoples of being “separatists,” “terrorists,” and “religious extremists,” and portray Chinese settlers as victims to justify the subsequent extra-judicial crackdown. And finally, China has implemented policies of “cultural genocide” by prohibiting the assertion of indigenous identities, banning the use of their languages, criminalizing important aspects of their traditional religious beliefs and practices and discriminating against Uighurs institutionally. By denying economic opportunities, Uighurs have been left in abject poverty, and forced to accept assimilation. The Uighurs are indeed Muslim, but the Uighur issue is not about terrorism, jihadism or establishing a caliphate — as China wants the world to believe. It is about a colonized people’s legitimate demands to live with dignity, human rights and self-determination in the 21st century. The Uighurs resist Chinese rule because it is inherently despotic. Uighur refugees now say that East Turkestan has become a police state. Chinese special forces have been carrying out security operations in predominantly Uighur towns and cities since May, when President Xi Jinping announced a one-year anti-terror campaign in East Turkestan. Under the Chinese military’s rules of engagement, soldiers were given the green light to shoot and kill any Uighur during a confrontation. The arrival of the Holy Month of Ramadan and the fifth anniversary of the Urumchi Massacre, in which untold numbers of peaceful Uighur protestors were gunned down by Chinese soldiers on July 5, 2009, have made the political situation worse as China seems determined to keep a tight lid on the Uighur people through systematic intimidation, mass show trials, heavy sentencing and executions. The future looks bleak for the Uighurs, and other indigenous peoples in China, if the international community chooses to turn a blind eye to their

situation. At this critical juncture, it is imperative for the United States , European Union, Organization of Islamic Conference, and the United Nations to bluntly tell China to stop the ongoing security operations in East Turkestan and stop the systematic intimidation of Uighurs, who should be allowed to fast during Ramadan and practice their faith. Without diplomatic pressure from the Western and Muslim world, the situation in East Turkestan can only deteriorate — at great human cost and postponing indefinitely the political resolution that the issue of East Turkestan needs.

The Uighurs will increase in militarism as a result of Chinese-US relationsAli, 16 (Mohanad, Journalist for Al Arabiya English, “China’s proxy war in Syria: Revealing the role of Uighur fighters” http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/analysis/2016/03/02/China-s-proxy-war-in-Syria-Revealing-the-role-of-Uighur-fighters-.html, 3/2/16 CCC) A few months ago, in a remote town in Idlib province, northern Syria, an unusual foreign militant presence alarmed Syrian locals. The fighters were reportedly of the Muslim Uighur minority from Xinjiang province in Western China. For a population which has grown used to the multinational nature of the militancy, two aspects of these new fighters struck them: their large numbers and their ethnicity. A year ago, they

were barely hundreds of Uighur fighters, belonging to the Al-Nusra Front-allied Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP). Today, according to several sources in the province, there are a few thousand Uighur fighters , and many of them arrived with their families after a long and treacherous journey from China and central Asia. The Uighur are believed to have been seen in large numbers in disparate regions of Idlib, including the strategic town of Jisr al-Shoghur, Ariha, and the highlands of Jabal al-Zawiya. They have settled with their families in deserted Alawite towns in Jisr al-Shoghur, a local journalist told Al Arabiya English. Videos have emerged since last October

purporting to show them fighting in al-Ghab plains in Hama’s western countryside. And in Jib Al-Ahmar in Latakia Province, the propaganda material showcases a tank and U.S. made anti-armor Tow missiles. The Uighur militants had reportedly moved into Syria following a Chinese-backed Pakistani campaign against their bases on the borders with Afghanistan . The Pakistani military claimed they had assassinated the group’s leader, Abdul Haq, in 2010. The Pakistani Defense minister went further during a visit to China last year, to declare the al-Qaeda linked group members have either been killed, or have left Afghanistan somehow. The Uighur’s increasing presence is believed to be behind the string of reports about possible Chinese intervention alongside the Russian and Syrian regime forces. Last December, the Chinese parliament passed a controversial counter terrorism law, which allows the red army to venture abroad. China started building its first overseas naval base in Djibouti, Africa, and conducted in January elite forces trainings for “desert operations” in “unfamiliar territory.” “There are weapons and technical supplies,” a

Syrian regime source said, and “ the Chinese Embassy’s security delegation has been expanded, suggesting preparations for a wider role, and a Chinese team of experts had arrived in Damascus’s military airport.” The major question, the source continues, is whether the Chinese military would play a crucial role in the fight to regain Idlib . However, a Chinese ground intervention remains highly unlikely, according to Professor Steve Tsang, Associate fellow at Chatham House’s Associate Program. Tsang told Al Arabiya English that he believes the Chinese government lacks both “the military capability and political will” to sustain such an engagement. “The Chinese government will support the Russians as they don’t want to see Assad fall.” A Syrian militant source in close contact with Uighur fighters believes they are in Syria to stay. The Uighur fighters speak of a treacherous journey from their home province and the Pakistan-Afghan borders to Syria, according to the source, who cites conversations with the

militants. “Their journey was very costly, an Uighur fighter told me he sold his house to afford the trip here with his family members. How could he think of returning?” And unlike many other groups and foreign fighters, “they don’t hide their faces, although this carries a huge risk back home. They don’t plan to return, ” says the militant. The Uighur families have allegedly settled in abandoned towns, previously inhabited by minorities, especially Alawites who fled in fear of persecution, according to two journalists from Idlib. To help this process, the Turkistan Islamic Party, previously known as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), printed an Arabic language magazine,Turkistan al-Islamiya, introducing the local population and other militant groups to their plight under China’s Communist rule, especially the tensions with the Han settlers, whose immigration has been allegedly encouraged by the government to turn the Uighur into even more of a minority. “We have been largely unaware of their plight, and their magazine has helped breed some sympathy for their cause,” the Syrian militant said. However, he adds: “They remain largely poor in resources, usually aiming for free rides in transportation.” Since they are latecomers, the Uighur fighters have missed on the great spoils of heavy weaponry from the regime forces. This has reportedly left the Uighur militants totally reliant on Nusra. In fact, their relatively large number enforced the organization’s previously dwindling ranks, as it had suffered in its fight against ISIS. The

Uighur have allegedly played a crucial role in Nusra’s recent gains in the Idlib province. Their military achievements and their abstinence from interfering in civilian issues, such as levying taxes or enforcing Sharia law, has rendered them popular among the population, according to sources in Idlib. Their alliance with Nusra is believed to be a continuation of long ties with al-Qaeda, and their allegiance to the Taliban movement. Xinjiang borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their relationship with the Taliban extended beyond the Afghan war in 2001 until the summer of 2015. The party was quick to issue an obituary to the Taliban’s founder, Mullah Omar. According to militant sources in contact with the TIP, their strained relations with ISIS, are partly due to the latter’s tensions with the Taliban in Afghanistan. “Allegiance to Taliban’s leader is of primary significance,” a militant based in Idlib told Al Arabiya English, “they call ISIS ‘Khawarij’ for refusing to pledge allegiance to Taliban’s leader,” whom they consider the true Caliph. The Uighur presence has wider implications on the prospects for Syria, according to a Syrian journalist based in Aleppo. “The regional and international communities want this conflict prolonged,” he says. “This conflict is no longer about Syrians, it is the mother of many other conflicts.”

Impact MagnifiersUighur terrorist attacks increasingThe London Post, 14 (“Suicide bomb carnage in China city” http://thelondonpost.net/2014/05/suicide-bomb-carnage-in-china-city/ 5/22/2014 CCC)

Atta ckers crashed a pair of vehicles and hurled explosives in a suicide attack near an open air market in the capital of China’s volatile north-western region of Xinjiang, leaving an unknown number of people dead and injured. The official Xinhua News Agency said several people were rushed to hospital and flames and heavy smoke were seen

at the scene, which was cordoned off. Xinhua said the assailants drove through crowds of shoppers in off-road vehicles and threw explosives out the window before crashing head-on in the early morning attack in the city of Urumqi. It said one of the vehicles then exploded and quoted an eyewitness as saying there had been up to a dozen blasts in all. A statement from the Xinjiang regional government said the attack happened at 7.50am local time and people had been killed and injured, but gave no further deta ils. “I heard four or five explosions. I was very scared. I saw three or four people lying on the ground,” said Fang Shaoying, the owner of a small supermarket near the scene of the blast. Photos from the scene posted to popular Chinese social media site Weibo showed at least three people lying in a street with a large fire in the distance giving off huge plumes of smoke. Others were sitting in the road in shock, with vegetables, boxes and stools strewn around them. Police in helmets and body armour were seen manning roadblocks as police cars, ambulances and fire engines arrived. Urumqi was the scene of a railway station bomb attack late last month that killed three people, including two attackers, and injured 79. Security in the

city has been significantly tightened since the attack, which took place as Chinese leader Xi Jinping was concluding a visit to the region. The city saw ethnic riots that killed nearly 200 people in 2009, but had been relatively quiet since then amid a smothering police presence. The station attack and other violence have been blamed on radicals from among the region’s native Turkic Uighur Muslim population seeking to overthrow Chinese rule in the region . Information about events in the area about 1,550 miles west of Beijing is tightly controlled. Tensions between Chinese and ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang have been simmering for years, but recent attacks – while still relatively crude – show an audaciousness and deliberateness that wasn’t present before. They are also increasingly going after civilians, rather than the police and government targets of past years. In an unprecedented incident last year, three Uighurs rammed a vehicle into crowds in a suicide attack near the Forbidden City gate in the heart of Beijing, killing themselves and two tourists. And in March, 29 people were slashed and stabbed to death at a train station in the southern city of Yunnan blamed on Uighur extremists bent on waging jihad. Uighur activists say the violence is being fueled by restrictive and discriminatory policies and practices directed at Uighurs and a sense that the benefits of economic growth have largely accrued to Chinese migrants while excluding Uighurs. The knowledge that Muslims elsewhere are rising up against their governments also seems to be contributing to the increased militancy. The latest attack came two days after courts in Xinjiang sentenced 39 people to prison after being convicted of crimes including organizing and leading terrorist groups, inciting ethnic hatred, ethnic discrimination and the illegal manufacturing of guns. Among those convicted was 25-year-old Maimaitiniyazi Aini, who received five years for inciting ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination for comments he made in six chat groups involving 1,310 people, the Supreme Court said. In another case, a Uighur man was jailed for 15 years after he preached jihad, or holy war, to his son and another young man, according to the court.

Al Qaeda supports Uighur terrorist attacks and plans on taking revenge on chinaMoore, 09 (Malcolm, 2012 Foreign Press Association award winner, Telegraph’s Beijing correspondent, ”Al-Qaeda vows revenge on China over Uighur deaths” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5822791/Al-Qaeda-vows-revenge-on-China-over-Uighur-deaths.html, 7/2009 CCC)

The threat came in the wake of race riots in far West China which claimed the lives of at least 136 Han Chinese and 46 Uighurs. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) said it would target the 50,000 Chinese who are working in Algeria and launch attacks against other Chinese projects in Northern Africa, said Stirling Assynt, which is based in London. "This threat should be taken seriously," it said, adding that three weeks ago the group had ambushed a convoy of

Algerian security forces who were protecting Chinese engineers, killing 24 Algerians. "Future attacks of this kind are likely to target security forces and Chinese engineers alike." China has repeatedly linked Uighur separatist

groups to Al-Qaeda, but this is the first time that the terrorist network has made a direct threat against China or its overseas projects. Violence in Urumqi flared up again on Monday as Chinese police shot and killed two Uighur men armed with knives and sticks who were attacking another Uighur man, according to an official statement. Uighur activists have

claimed the true number of Uighur casualties has been understated by the Chinese government. Stirling Assynt said that although AQIM was the first arm to target China, "others are likely to follow". It said that it had monitored an increase in internet "chatter" among possible jihadists about the need to "avenge the perceived injustices in Xinjiang." "Some of these individuals have been actively seeking information on China's interests in the Muslim world which they could use for targeting purposes," Stirling Assynt said, adding that

locations included North Africa, Sudan, Pakistan and Yemen. Two extremist web sites affiliated with Al-Qaeda noted that large numbers of Chinese work in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. "Chop off their heads at their workplaces or in their homes to tell them that the time of enslaving Muslims has gone," read one posting.

ExtrasUS pressure k2 stop Chinese human rights abuses

HRW 16, Human Rights Watch is a nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization (6/5, US: Show Breadth of Rights Commitment at China Dialogue, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/06/05/us-show-breadth-rights-commitment-china-dialogue)

The United States should make the need for progress on key human rights issues in China a top priority in the final US-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue (S&ED) for the Obama administration, Human Rights Watch said today. The talks, involving more

than a dozen agencies from each government, will be held in Beijing from June 6-8, 2016. “This is the Obama administration’s last best chance to show it incorporates human rights across the scope of the bilateral relationship and demands change , from law enforcement cooperation to surveillance on ethnic minority regions, to Beijing’s ferocious assault on civil society,” said Sophie Richardson,

China director at Human Rights Watch. “US human rights advocacy with China can succeed when it is unapologetic, public, and argued

by diverse interests.” In a joint letter Human Rights Watch and nine other organizations - Amnesty International, China Aid, Freedom House, Human Rights in China, Initiatives for China, International Campaign for Tibet, Reporters without Borders, Uyghur Human Rights Project, and World Uygur Congress -

urged the US to : Meet with representatives of civil society in China during or immediately after the meeting; Press Chinese counterparts to repeal or bring into line with international law new national security laws, including the Counterterrorism and the Foreign Non-Governmental Management laws ; Publicly call for the release of specific individuals detained for peacefully exercising their rights ; and Publicly discuss US concerns about growing restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and religion, among others. The talks create an opportunity for the US to take unequivocal steps towards integrating human rights into its wider strategic goals and to make clear the priority it assigns to these issues, Human Rights Watch said. Since the June 2015 strategic dialogue, the US has issued statements expressing concern about a range of human rights abuses in China, including the July-September 2015 sweep of lawyers and activists across the country, 25 of whom remain detained. The US has also publicly called on Beijing to repeal or not adopt abusive laws, including the Foreign NGO Management Law. In March, it spearheaded an unprecedented statement at the United Nations Human Rights Council, calling on China to end its arbitrary detention of lawyers and activists, and its extraterritorial

abuses. At the same time, Chinese authorities have committed or tolerated gross human rights violations. Few members of the police or other security forces are held accountable for torture or other abuses, and there is no political or legal impulse for fundamental reforms necessary to curb their power. Peaceful prominent activists, including Guo Feixiong and Tang Jingling, have been given harsh sentences, some on vague charges of “disturbing public order.” Nor is there any progress towards accountability for the June 3-4, 1989, Tiananmen Massacre, the 27th anniversary of which came just two days before the opening of the strategic talks. Human Rights Watch has long encouraged the US and other governments to take a broader approach to human rights in

China, particularly as the number of government agencies and officials interacting with Chinese counterparts has grown exponentially over the last decade. Greater human rights protections in China are in the US interest, and raising these concerns outside the normal channels, through diverse and coordinated actors, is more likely to produce results. US officials have described their strategy as a “ whole of government ” approach. Yet there is little evidence that officials , other than those

from the State Department or the White House, are raising such concerns . “President Xi and his government have sadly left the US spoiled for choice on which human rights issues to raise ,” Richardson said. “The question is: will the US use its whole weight at the S&ED talks with China to push back effectively ?”

Tibet

1NC Shell The US has yet to engage with china over TibetRosengren, 13 (Eleanor Bryne, Director of Free Tibet, “Rights Group: Obama must turn up the heat on Tibet” http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/06/opinion/china-free-tibet-immolations-obama-xi/ , 6/6/13 CCC)

There have been countless official "expressions of concern" about the situation since the self-immolations started to spread two years ago, and we are constantly reassured that private channels are being used to apply pressure to China. Officials and junior ministers are permitted to issue calls for restraint. But there is a ceiling above which such statements do not go: leaders remain mute. President Obama has not publicly addressed the issue of human rights in Tibet since taking office. Secretary of State John Kerry has made one careful comment since his appointment, but there is no evidence he raised Tibet during his visit to China in April. China recently threatened commercial consequences for the UK unless Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for meeting the Dalai Lama in private last year. His response -- while falling short of an apology -- reassured them that the UK views Tibet as part of China, and failed to mention human rights at all. Sinologists -- and spin doctors -- in Washington or the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth office may argue that Tibet will benefit from a sensitive approach . Late last year, however, two British government ministers who had been leaned on not to meet with the Dalai Lama for fear of offending China again, finally lost patience with that view , writing that "where Tibet is concerned, the Chinese government does not respond positively to any conciliatory gesture ... but instead interprets this as a sign of weakness and so makes further demands for concessions." What goes for London goes for Washington -- and Berlin, Paris and Ottawa for that matter. Western policy on Tibet is pleasing no one -- not China, not the electorates, and certainly not Tibetans. It must be changed. China's economic engine is slowing, and Beijing is acutely conscious that without growth, its 1.3 billion people will be far less tolerant of continued dictatorship. Between 250 to 500 public protests are already estimated to take place every day in China -- foreign trade and investment will dry up if China starts to look like an unstable place to do business. R eform is in China's interests. China also seeks legitimacy as a full member of the world community and is undoubtedly sensitive to criticism on human rights. This year, it seeks election to the U.N.'s Human Rights Council (HRC). While economic muscle helps it win nations' votes for the HRC election, it still needs to offer its potential voters some tokens of sincerity . More tellingly, China actually accepted 42 out of 99 recommendations to improve its performance on human rights following its last full human rights review by the UN in 2009. In choosing not simply to reject that kind of external assessment, China has also accepted the need to demonstrate progress. It faces another such review this year. Beijing has not gone soft, however. It will not choose to show progress on Tibet, unless it is called to account for Tibet. No one expects President Obama to embarrass his guest this weekend with tasteless honesty or Arab Spring-style rhetoric on Tibet. But bringing Tibet to the table will show China and the American people he represents that he recognizes the old model has failed. China, the U.S. and Tibet all stand to benefit from that.

US engagement in China endorses massive human rights abusesKoh 7 [Dean and Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale Law School; U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 1998-2001; Attorney-Adviser at the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, 1983-85, “Restoring America's Human Rights Reputation”, 40 Cornell Int'l L.J. 635, lexis]

As I elaborate below, we now fail to tell the full truth about our human rights con duct and that of our allies in the War

on Terror. Increasingly, we avoid application of universal standards, whether Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions or the rules against torture and cruel inhuman or degrading treatment. n6 But the United States cannot lead the world with moral authority unless we hold ourselves to the same high standards that we demand from others. The United States has put its own human rights practices center stage by promoting double standards for our allies and arguing in favor of "law-free zones" (like Guantanamo), "law-free practices" (like extraordinary rendition), "law-free persons" (who are dubbed "enemy combatants"), and "law-free courts" (like the system of military commissions, which have failed to deliver credible justice and are currently being challenged in our courts for legislation recently stripping detainees on [*638] Guantanamo of the

writ of habeas corpus). n7 Through these misguided policies, the Administration has shifted the world's focus from the grotesque human rights abuses of the terrorists to America's own human rights misconduct, leaving other, equally pressing issues elsewhere ignored or unaddressed. Similarly, we have abandoned a consistent approach to past, present, and future abuses . By unwisely opposing the ICC, we have lost our focus on accountability for past abuses. The Bush Administration has regularly opposed efforts to redress human rights abuses through civil liability under the Alien Tort Claims Act, although both the Carter and Clinton Administrations had filed briefs in support of victims' claims. n8 Ironically, despite its avowed hostility toward international criminal adjudication, in the past few years, the Bush Administration has retreated from outright opposition toward international criminal adjudication to a de facto policy of benign coexistence with mechanisms of accountability. Recently, for example, the Bush administration consented to the U.N. Security Council's referral of the Darfur genocide case to the ICC, n9 passively supported ICC prosecutions in Congo and Uganda, n10 called for prosecution of Charles Taylor before the Special Court for Sierra Leone (and indicted his son, Chuckie), n11 and strongly supported the prosecutions of both Slobodan Milosevic before the International

Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia n12 and Saddam Hussein before the Iraqi Special Tribunal. n13 As I elaborate below, the United States has proven notably ineffective in curbing ongoing abuse in four situations: (1) in the face of genocide in Darfur, (2) as committed by our major allies, especially those in the War on Terror, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, (3) in the so-called "Axis of Evil" countries - North Korea, Iran, and Iraq - as well as in Afghanistan, notwithstanding our military interventions, and (4) in such traditional

geopolitical rivals as China, Russia, and Cuba. Finally, we have not built our capacity for preventing future abuse.

Around the world, our democracy-building efforts have stalled. We have counterproductively weakened multilateral and regional institutions for global cooperation in the implementation of human rights and humanitarian norms - the ICC, the United Nations, the Human Rights Council - even while shying away from closer collaboration with democratic coalitions [*639] in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. This year, the United States refused to join the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, apparently because its own practices arguably violate the terms of the Convention. n14 In addition, the United States refused to participate meaningfully in the negotiation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities even though our country has significant expertise in this area, could have contributed importantly to the content and implementation of the Convention, and exhibits among the best disability practices in the world. n15 II. Troubling Trends and Ineffective Responses These broader patterns become evident upon a close reading of the 2006 State Department Annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. For thirty years, these reports have formed the heart of American human rights policy by providing the official information base upon which all branches of the federal government can make policy judgments. n16 Although characteristically thorough, this year's reports reflect a number of troubling trends that illustrate the problems I have identified above. A. Troubling Changes in Terminology When I was Assistant Secretary of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, I gave only one directive regarding these reports: Tell the truth. Reasonable minds may differ about what policy consequences should flow from the same truthful reporting about human rights conditions, but they [*640] should not differ materially about what the true facts are. Yet in too many respects, this year's Country Reports show that our Government is not telling the full truth either about our human rights conduct or that of our allies in the War on Terror. For example, this year's Country Reports evidence both troubling changes in terminology and noticeable underreporting of human rights violations. In the Syria, Libya, and Pakistan reports, for example, the State Department now describes acts that it had previously described as "torture" under the broader linguistic category of "torture and abuse." n17 This change hardly seems accidental. In the Department of Justice's infamous 2002 "Torture Memo," the Office of Legal Counsel argued in favor of an absurdly narrow definition of torture: "[inflicting] physical pain ... equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." n18 Yet as I have noted elsewhere, under that definition, many acts committed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq would not have counted as "torture" even though the Bush White House had previously condemned those very acts as "torture" when Saddam's regime committed them. n19 Recently, the Administration [*641] has denied that it is engaged in or supports torture, n20 but one might read the linguistic shift in the reports to suggest that the Administration still wants to preserve its freedom - as well as the freedom of the Syrians, Libyans, and Pakistanis - to commit actions that it now calls "abuse" as part of the War on Terror. n21 B.

Underreporting of Violations Furthermore, the reports exhibit significant underreporting of human rights violations, especially when committed by U.S. allies. For example, the report on Indonesia fails to mention possible human rights violations committed by the United States-supported police anti-terrorism unit, Detachment 88. n22 Likewise, the report on Afghanistan notes human rights abuses committed by government forces, including extrajudicial killings and torture, but claims that "elements of the security forces acted independently of government authority" n23 even though President Karzai has appointed a number of

warlords and known human rights abusers as regional police chiefs. n24 The report on Afghanistan mentions that some organizations "reported the presence of secret or unofficial prisons through 2005" n25 but fails to mention the U.S. role in detention operations in Afghanistan, particularly the well-known U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Force Base, where over 600 individuals are believed to be detained. n26 [*642] Similarly, the report on Iraq omits any reference to the detention and interrogation activities of the United States in-country. The report counts only non-coalition force detainees and fails to mention the numerous American-run Multi-National Force detention facilities in Iraq, which as of October 2006 held approximately 14,000 detainees throughout the country. n27 The Jordan report estimates that 500,000 to 700,000 Iraqis are living in Jordan and notes that "the government has tolerated the prolonged stay of many Iraqis beyond the expiration of the visit permits, under which they entered the country." n28 The report, however, makes little or no mention of the often miserable conditions in which Iraqi residents of Jordan live or the recent difficulties that Iraqis fleeing the war zone have had in gaining entry to Jordan. n29 In the same vein, the report on Egypt is overly positive about the multi-party elections that took place in 2005. n30 The report fails to mention that during the presidential election, President Mubarak had accepted greater press freedom and relaxed intimidation of opposition forces, only to reverse course in 2006 and extend the Emergency Law until 2008. n31 In March of 2007, Egypt essentially constitutionalized the Emergency Law by enacting antiterrorism amendments to its Constitution to give the President permanent emergency powers, in what appears to have been a rigged vote. n32 The government also postponed municipal elections, originally scheduled to take place last year, and cracked down on dissidents and judges seeking greater independence. n33 Additionally, the Egypt report does not mention that Italy has just indicted Italian and U.S. officials for their role in the abduction and transfer of an Egyptian cleric, Osama Hassan Mustafa Nasr, to Egypt where he allegedly was tortured. n34 [*643] The Pakistan report makes scant mention of Pakistan's role in detaining, interrogating, and transporting detainees, even though a European Union parliamentary investigation and Human Rights Watch have chronicled several cases of torture and abuse of terrorist suspects on Pakistani soil. n35 Pakistani officials arbitrarily have arrested and detained hundreds of people suspected of links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and subjected scores of victims to enforced disappearance and unlawfully transferred others to the custody of other countries, including the United States. n36 Still, the United States has noticeably muted its criticism of Pakistan in recent years, apparently because of Pakistan's support in the "War on Terror." The Pakistan report cites a comprehensive report by Amnesty International, n37 but nowhere acknowledges specific findings in the Amnesty report that forced disappearances of individuals believed to be members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban soared after 2001; that hundreds have been arbitrarily arrested and detained; that some have been unlawfully transferred to the custody of other countries, notably to the United States for detention at Guantanamo; and that U.S. intelligence personnel appear to have known of or participated in the arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance of some terror suspects in Pakistan. n38 Similarly, the reports on a number of the Council of Europe member states contain no reference to the 2006 Report of the Parliamentary Assembly's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on the "alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states." n39 That damning report notes: [*644] The United States, an observer state of our Organisation, actually created this reprehensible network, which we criticise in light of the values shared on both sides of the Atlantic. But we also believe ... that it is only through the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners that this 'web' was able to spread also over Europe. n40 The Council of Europe report identifies as playing varying roles in violating the rights of specific named persons: Sweden, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the United Kingdom, Italy, Macedonia, Germany, and Turkey. n41 The European report also singles out Poland and Romania for helping to run secret detention centers and Germany, Turkey, Spain. and Cyprus for serving as staging points for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees. n42 Likewise, the report on Canada is notably deficient in its coverage of the notorious extraordinary rendition case involving Maher Arar. The report omits any mention that the case arose in the anti-terrorism context. Although the report refers to the findings of the Canadian Commission of Inquiry convened to investigate Arar's case, n43 the report does not mention the Commission's conclusions that: (1) Arar very likely was detained and rendered to Syria by the United States because of incorrect intelligence suggesting that he posed a terrorism threat due to his suspected links and sympathies with extremist Islamic organizations, n44 (2) Arar's account of his torture in Syria was "completely credible," n45 (3) no evidence existed that Arar posed any kind of national security threat, and (4) U.S. officials misled Canadian officials about their treatment of Arar and very likely bear much of the blame for Arar's ordeal. n46 The report also fails to mention that the "United States ... declined [the Canadian Commission's] invitation to give evidence or otherwise participate in the hearings." n47 Furthermore, the report does not mention that after the Commission's findings were announced: the Prime Minister issued a formal apology to Arar and his family, n48 the Government of Canada compensated Arar with a multi-million dollar payment, n49 and the former RMCP (police) Commissioner resigned the day after testifying before a House of Commons committee [*645] about the Arar affair. n50 Finally, the report downplays the Commission's remedial suggestion to create an entirely new agency for reviewing the RCMP's national security activities in order to ensure that similar travesties do not occur in the future. n51 The Introduction to the report on Turkmenistan, called one of the "world's most repressive and closed countries" by Human Rights Watch, n52 focuses primarily on press freedoms, not on the multitude of other serious human rights violations committed in the country. n53 Similarly, the Morocco report severely downplays abuses in Western Sahara. n54 The report also fails to chronicle several well-documented cases in which individuals arrested in Pakistan were rendered to Morocco, detained, and allegedly tortured. n55 In short, the Country Reports are as significant for what they omit as for what they report and do not tell the whole truth and nothing but

the truth. C. Ineffective Responses Most fundamentally, the Country Reports tell a story of the repeated failure of current U.S. human rights policy. They attest to our striking ineffectiveness in curbing abuses in four categories of countries: (1) in the face of genocide in Darfur, Sudan, (2) as committed by our major allies, especially those in the War on Terror, (3) in the so-called "Axis of Evil" countries--North Korea, Iran, and Iraq - as well as in Afghanistan, notwithstanding our costly military

interventions in two of those countries, and (4) in such traditional geopolitical rivals as China, Russia, and Cuba. [*646] 1. Sudan The Sudan report is admirably thorough and unflinching in its condemnation of the Sudanese government in Khartoum. It appropriately refers to events in Darfur as "genocide," attributes primary responsibility to the government militia, and accurately portrays the escalating violence toward the end of last year. n56 Sadly, however, this reporting only raises more sharply the question: If this is our frank assessment of the ongoing human rights crisis in Sudan, what is the United States now doing to stop what we called "genocide" several years ago? 2. Allies As noted above, the

Country Reports persistently underreport, selectively report, or simply omit description of human rights violations committed by our perceived allies in the War on Terror. Even where the reports do accurately report human rights abuses, the dismal record only attests to our reduced or ineffective efforts at human rights advocacy in those countries. In perhaps the starkest example, Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf continues to rule with an iron fist despite his broken promises to put Pakistan on the road to democratic reform. n57 Despite the passage of the Women's Protection Bill, gender-based violence, including honor killings, recurred frequently during the past year, forced disappearances increased substantially, arbitrary arrest and lengthy pretrial detention are pervasive, and an increasing number of journalists are being targeted for harassment, intimidation, and arrests. n58 The Saudi Arabia report accurately calls the human rights situation in that country "poor" n59 but pulls its punches by omitting several accounts of abuse in prisons that can be found in the Human Rights Watch 2007 Report. n60 Significantly, the report acknowledges press accounts claiming that Saudi Arabia "did not imprison persons on political grounds, but because they were terrorists or collaborators with terrorists." n61 The report also underplays the Saudi government's significant oppression of human rights defenders (ten of whom were arrested in February 2007) n62 and the persistent government denial of access to prisons for human rights [*647] monitors, n63 a continuing, major barrier to accurate human rights monitoring and reporting in Saudi Arabia. Systematic underreporting of violations does not seem limited to the security context and U.S. allies in the War on Terror. For example, in 2005, the International Labor Organization (ILO) published three reports documenting the widespread existence of forced labor in Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. n64 In Peru and Bolivia, where this problem is most acute, the ILO estimated that tens of thousands of individuals were subjected to debt bondage. n65 Although levels of forced labor are comparable in Peru and Bolivia, the U.S. State Department's reporting of these findings on Bolivia are expounded at length, but the Peruvian case is relegated to a single sentence in the Peru report, n66 perhaps because of the Administration's desire to secure prompt passage of the Peru-U.S. Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA), which currently contains weak labor provisions and whose legislative fate may be decided this year. n67 3. The "Axis of Evil" (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) Plus Afghanistan Despite the Administration's aggressive rhetoric - and in some cases, even military intervention - in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan, their human rights record seems to be deteriorating. According to the Afghanistan report, for example, the security situation there has deteriorated and basic human rights are not guaranteed even though it has been more than five years since the fall of the Taliban. n68 Weak central institutions and a deadly insurgency contributed to the ineffectiveness of the government [*648] to secure basic rights. n69 The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other extremist groups stepped up attacks against government, aid personnel, and unarmed civilians, and the number of suicide bombings rose dramatically during the year. n70 According to the report, the United States-supported government in Afghanistan also committed its own share of human rights abuses, including arbitrary arrests and detention, extrajudicial killings, torture, and poor prison conditions. n71 It remains unclear how much the United States Government is meaningfully doing to reverse this trend. As the daily headlines chronicle, the human rights situation in Iraq deteriorates by the day. n72 As the Iraq Study Group reported, the internal situation is descending into chaos, as the insurgency has wreaked havoc on the government's ability to ensure that the people of Iraq can enjoy even basic rights. n73 Recently, extrajudicial killings markedly increased, and terrorist groups and death squads killed thousands of Iraqis in Baghdad alone. n74 Given the precarious security situation, human rights issues have moved to the backburner in Iraq and will be increasingly at risk, especially in the area of detainee treatment, as the United States asks the Iraqis to assume a greater role in security operations. The human rights situation in Iran remains increasingly disturbing. n75 [*649] Although a great percentage of the Iranian people support democratic reform, the country remains in the hands of the conservative clerics, who closely monitor and restrict the opposition and the press, punish human rights defenders, and impose a strict form of Sharia law that denies basic rights to women and minorities. n76 This year, the Iranian government shut down two independent newspapers and blocked access to many media internet sites. n77 Yet the United States' saber-rattling approach has blunted its ability to gain human rights leverage. In criticizing Iran for its "severe restriction of the right of citizens to change their government peacefully," n78 the report uses visibly stronger language than is found in the reports for Syria and Saudi Arabia, which have arguably similar levels of restrictions on the right to change the government. n79 Moreover, our criticism of Iranian "security forces [who] monitored the social activities of citizens, entered homes and offices, monitored telephone conversations, and opened mail without court authorization" n80 is hard to square with our own National Security Agency's sustained program of secret, unreviewed, warrantless electronic surveillance of American citizens and residents. n81 Futhermore, the United States cannot stand on strong footing attacking Iran for "illegal detentions" when similar charges can be and have been lodged against our own government. n82 Nowhere is the picture more depressing than North Korea, which I visited as a State Department official in the Fall of 2000. As the report [*650] chronicles, no human rights progress has been made there despite our aggressive rhetoric. n83 The country remains one of the most repressed, closed, and isolated countries in the world. The regime tightly controls the lives of its citizens, denying them freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association, and restricting freedom of movement and worker rights. n84 The North Korean government detained an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people, including political prisoners and returned refugees from China, many of whom suffered from torture, starvation, disease, and exposure. n85 Forced abortions of pregnant female prisoners were reported, as were cases in which babies were killed upon birth in prisons. n86 In short, tough U.S. rhetoric and even military intervention have not yielded noticeable human rights improvement in countries that have been targeted for American human rights criticism. 4. Traditional Geopolitical Rivals A similar pattern of ineffectiveness emerges from examination of the Country Reports of three traditional geopolitical rivals: China,

Russia, and Cuba. a) China Happily, the China report continues to be frank and detailed. The report forthrightly reports on the Chinese government's tight grip on the press and civil society, i ts tight controls upon NGOs and the media, its suppression of political dissent, and its continuing harassment, detention, and imprisonment of political and religious activists, journalists, writers, and lawyers. n87 The report also notes the continual stalling of long-promised legal reforms, that executions often took place the day after appeals, that China has continued its illegal repatriation of North Korean refugees, and the Chinese government's

severe cultural and religious repression of minorities in Tibet as well as Uighur Muslims. n88 Despite this

abysmal record, China undoubtedly has exploited the Bush Administration's human rights record to charge that the United States lacks standing to criticize China's human rights performance. "As in previous years, the State Department pointed the finger at human rights conditions in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but avoided touching on the human rights situation in the United States ," the Chinese government said in a report that Premier Wen Jiabao's office [*651] recently issued. n89 The report continued, "We urge the U.S. government to acknowledge its own human rights problems and stop interfering in other countries' internal affairs under the pretext of human rights." n90 China also has not hesitated to charge democracy activists with "terrorism," as it did in the case of Wang Bingzhang, the founder of the democracy magazine China Spring, who a Chinese court sentenced to life imprisonment for "organizing and leading a terrorist group . " n91 The report enumerates an array of limitations that the Chinese government imposed upon internet freedom. n92 It also lists the names of several individuals who were detained or imprisoned for their internet writing during the year. n93 Unfortunately, however, the report neither highlights the role of private multinational corporations in supplying the Chinese government with equipment and technology that can be used to block sites n94 nor does it fully call to account foreign content providers, such as Yahoo, AOL, Google, and Skype, who abide by PRC government wishes, including having internal content monitors, in order to be able to operate within mainland China. n95 As a number of human rights and media NGOs have noted, these content-provider companies have in many respects effectively assumed

the government's role as censor to stifle access to information. n96 The U.S. government plainly must do more both to press the Chinese government to relax its restrictions and to persuade private companies to stop contributing to the Chinese authorities' censorship efforts.

Western countries have failed to exonerate china’s human rights abuses due to benefits they receive from sino relations- it is unethical and time for western powers to condemn these problems.The Tibet Post 14 (“China should be condemned for its Human Rights abuses in Tibet” http://www.thetibetpost.com/en/outlook/opinions-and-columns/4217-china-should-be-condemned-for-its-human-rights-abuses-in-tibet, 8/17/2014 CCC)

Dharamshala: - In recent years the international community – including the United Nations, European Union, and the US government – has failed to clearly and forcefully raise the issue of human rights during visits to China. This significant issue consistently goes unmentioned in bilateral talks, despite severe human rights violations in Tibet, Eastern Turkestan, and China. International communities across the world have a long-established demand for respecting human dignity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, after all, has set a common standard of treatment for mankind since 1948. Obviously, the international community's failure to uphold these high ideals in previous cases of rights atrocities has drawn serious criticism. The international regret for letting genocide occur in Rwanda in the 1990's is nearly unanimous, and is seen as one of the largest UN failures. Indeed, the recently-popular "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) school of international thought found its basis in this catastrophe. Scholars were uncomfortable with an international legal system that protected state sovereignty even to the point of allowing gross human rights atrocities, and sought out a mechanism to correct this fault. With international remorse strong enough to bring

about R2P, it would seem the globe is tired of gross rights violations. But the unfortunate question remains: Why does the subject of human rights, officially under the international community's protection for almost seven decades, remain such a challenge for so many places in the world today? The question seems almost naïve in its simplicity, but its answer continues to elude consensus. The easy response, and the one into which many governments fall, is that the reports of violence in Tibet have yet to achieve satisfactory verification. The conflict, they say, is not one between a bully and a victim, but between two quarrelling sides: the Tibetans claim to experience rights violations, and the Chinese claim the opposite. Other global governments argue the international community must have independent verification these violations are ongoing before they are ready to act. Although it is simply wrong to claim that the conflict is mutual – independent reports everywhere from Amnesty International to Spain-based rights groups have confirmed the one-sided violence – the best way to verify the "alleged" claims is quite clear: send a team to China to investigate. However, attempts to do so, or at least attempts to perform investigations that could be comprehensive enough to be satisfactory, fall flat. The doubtful governments should note that it is not the Tibetan community – neither in exile nor within Tibet – that rejects these initiatives. It welcomes them. The unwelcome host remains the Chinese government, which continues to benefit from a Tibet shrouded in secrecy. The regime desires to spin its own story rather than risk a more transparent process. This should leave fewer questions in the minds of those aforementioned

"doubting governments." As for rights abuses, perhaps it would be helpful to mention recent developments. Beijing has hardened its stance on the issue of self-immolation by making "examples" of a few defiant relatives. These tactics are aimed to intimidate other family members and relatives of self-immolation protesters from toeing the official line. In recent years, we have seen an alarming rise in the number of Tibetans arrested and sentenced in connection with self-immolation protests, Some have even been sentenced to as many as six to ten years of heavy imprisonment for alleged connections to these cases of self-sacrifice. Many children and young adults in Tibet have lost their father, mother, or both, as a result of the persecution. Indeed, life can be so toilsome that at least 130 Tibetans have self-immolated. Our previous question regarding the persistence of human rights violations, of course, has another answer. This is that nations are aware of the rights violations, but fail to take action, for self-serving purposes. Let's hope the world has moved past that, or at least that the world can take daily small steps as a collective unit, out of a dark self-interest and into a

more enlightened notion of human rights. Let's hope the world is moved enough and shocked enough to hold the Chinese government and its leaders responsible for these horrendous abuses. Meanwhile, the long atrocities cry out for international condemnation. Perhaps a slowing Chinese economy (which many Western experts predict) will assist leaders in their transition from self-concern to concern for the greater rights of all, but that has yet to occur. Many Tibetans are simply adopting a new strategy: expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised. However, history has witnessed and re-witnessed the reality that no dictator and no totalitarian state last long. When China's leadership tries to evade responsibility for its crimes, the voice of the international community should speak with resounding clarity and unity, prepared to bring justice forward.

Chinese human rights abuses against Tibet will not stop without US intervention Free Tibet, 16 (“Human Rights in Tibet” https://freetibet.org/about/human-rights, 2016 CCC)

Every aspect of Tibetan life is under siege. Tibetans have even fewer civil and political rights than Chinese people also ruled by the Chinese

Communist Party. The Chinese government enforces its control on Tibet through the threat and use of arbitrary detentions and punishments, at times including severe violenc e . Any act deemed to threaten its rule can be made a criminal offence. Here are just some of the challenges faced by Tibetans as a result of China's occupation: POLITICAL OPPRESSION

AND VIOLENCE Tibetans face intense surveillance in their daily lives, with security cameras, police checkpoints and party officials monitoring their movements and activities. Peaceful protests are suppressed with severe violence. Protesters are imprisoned, tortured and may even be shot. China has repeatedly violated UN conventions through extensive use of torture against Tibetan political prisoners. Prisons in Tibet are full of people detained for simply expressing their desire for freedom. They are arrested and convicted for peaceful acts, such as waving the Tibetan flag, calling for the return of the Dalai Lama and sending information about events in Tibet abroad. Many Tibetans are imprisoned on unclear or unspecified charges, their families not informed of their whereabouts. They are denied access to proper legal support and face trials that do not respect international standards of justice. Tibetans charged with "separatism" (acts intended to divide or damage the Chinese state) can face sentences up to and including the death penalty. Even children face abuses of their freedom and human rights.

Structural violence outweighs – ignoring slow violence creates priming that psychologically structures escalation and makes war inevitableScheper-Hughes and Bourgois 4 (Nancy, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley and Philippe, Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)

This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e.

preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “ little” violences produced in the structures , habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities . More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention

centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder . We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view

that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not

ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race

relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible g enocides ” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City.

These are “ invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view , but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right

before our eyes and therefore taken for granted . In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct

relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken

place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are

needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch

2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize.

Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion,

dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic

“state of emergency ” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other

“total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life . The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is

carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide . But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to

hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations . It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer

the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified . The preparations for mass

killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the

early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum ” (as we call it)

that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare

queens ,” undocumented immigrants , drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).

XTViolating rights in the name of survival causes social paralysis and destroys the value to life.Callahan 73, institute of Society and Ethics, 1973 (Daniel, “The Tyranny of Survival”, p. 91-3)

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human

degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.

Sino control of Taiwan is questionably legal- creates China/Taiwan tensions The Office of Tibet, 16 (The Office of Tibet, Washington DC. “Invasion & After”, http://tibetoffice.org/tibet-info/invasion-after, 2016 CCC)

Recent events in Tibet have intensified the dispute over its legal status . The People’s Republic of China (P RC) claims that Tibet is an integral part of China. The T ibetan government -in-exile maintains that Tibet is an independent state under unlawful occupation. The question is highly relevant for at least two reasons. First, if Tibet is under unlawful Chinese occupation, Beijing’s large-scale transfer of Chinese settlers into Tibet is a serious violation of the fourth Geneva Convention of I949, which prohibits the transfer of civilian population into occupied territory. Second, if Tibet is under unlawful Chinese

occupation, China’s illegal presence in the country is a legitimate object of international concern . If, on the other hand, Tibet is an integral part of China, then these questions fall, a China claims, within its own domestic jurisdiction. The issue of human rights, including the right of self-determination and the right of the Tibetan people to maintain their own identity and autonomy are, of course, legitimate objects of international concern regardless of Tibet’s legal status. The PRC makes no claim to sovereign rights over Tibet as a result of its military subjugation and occupation of Tibet following the country’s invasion in I949-I950. Thus, China does not allege that it has acquired sovereignty by means of conquest, annexation or prescription in this period. Instead, it bases its claim to Tibet solely on their theory that Tibet has been an integral part of China for centuries. The question of Tibet’s status is essentially a legal question, albeit one of immediate political

relevance. The international status of a country must be determined by objective legal criteria rather than subjective political ones. Thus, whether a particular entity is a state in international law depends on whether it possesses the necessary criteria for statehood (territory, population, independent government, ability to conduct international relations), not whether governments of other states recognize its independent status . Recognition can provide evidence that foreign governments are willing to treat an entity as an independent state, but cannot create or extinguish a state. In many cases, such as the present one, it is necessary to examine a country’s history in order to determine its status. Such a historical study should logically be based primarily on the country’s own historical sources, rather than on interpretations contained in official sources of a foreign state, especially one claiming rights over the country in question. This may seem self-evident to most. When studying the history of France we examine French rather than German or Russian source materials. I am making the point, however, precisely because China’s claim to sovereignty over Tibet is based almost exclusively on self-serving Chinese official histories. Chinese sources portrayed most countries with whom the emperor of China had relations, not only Tibet, as vassals of the emperor. When studying Tibet’s history, Tibetan sources should be given primary importance; foreign sources, including Chinese ones, should only be given secondary weight.

Self-Immolation serves as a form of protest for Tibetans Phayul, 12 (“Six million Tibetans want freedom and independence” http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=32444, 11/14/2012 CCC)

DHARAMSHALA, November 14: A Tibetan self-immolator, who passed away in his fiery protest, called for “freedom and independence for Tibet,” in a last message he wrote before setting himself on fire.In his last testament, Nyingkar Tashi, 24, went on to call for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, while clearly stating that his self-immolation was in protest against the Chinese government. “Six million Tibetans want freedom for Tibet, independence for Tibet, freedom to learn Tibetan language, freedom to speak our mother tongue,” Tashi’s last note written in Tibetan states. “(Tibetans) demand the release of Panchen Lama

and that His Holiness the Dalai Lama must be allowed to come to Tibet.” “I set myself on fire in protest against the Chinese government.” He also urged family members, especially his father Tashi Namgyal, not be “saddened and concerned.” “My hope is for all six million Tibetans to learn Tibetan language, to speak in Tibetan, to wear Tibetan, and to be united.” On November 12, Nyingkar Tashi set himself on fire at Ghey-mar Thang in Dro Rongpo region of Rebkong, eastern Tibet, raising slogans for the long life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His self-immolation was witnessed by a large crowd of Tibetans who were visiting the area to offer prayers and condolences to the family members of Tibetan self-immolators Tamding Tso and Kalsang Jinpa. “The large gathering was able to rescue Nyingkar Tashi’s body from falling

into the hands of the Chinese security forces,” Dorjee Wangchuk, an exiled Tibetan with close contacts in the region told Phayul. “They later carried his body to his home.” Tamding Tso, a young mother of a seven-year-old son, set herself on fire on November 7

in Dro Rongpo, while Kalsang Jinpa self-immolated at the Dolma Square in front of the Rongwo Monastery, a day later. Massive anti-government protests erupted in the region, after the self-immolations, with thousands of school students and locals marching on the streets, raising slogans for freedom and the Dalai Lama’s return. According to Wangchuk, a large number of Chinese government and communist party officials travelled to Dowa town following the protests, to speak to local Tibetans and community leaders. “On November 11, the Chinese government officials, speaking to the public blamed outside forces for instigating the self-immolations and noted that such acts went against the country’s policies , ” Wangchuk said. “Again on November 12 local community leaders were summoned, which was around the same time when Nyingkar Tashi self-immolated.” Hours after his fiery protest, another Tibetan, Nyingchag Bum, passed away in his self-immolation protest in the same region. According to the exile Tibetan administration, a large number of military convoys were dispatched towards Dowa town soon after Monday’s twin protests. Various sources have told Phayul that Chinese authorities have cut off electricity in Dowa, disabling the use of internet, in a ploy to prevent further spread of information on the protests and the current situation there. No international calls could be made to the region, sparking fears of severe military repression and threat to the safety and security of local Tibetans. Ten Tibetans have set themselves on fire in November alone, taking the self-immolation toll to 72 since the fiery protests began in 2009.

Tibet wants independence, their movement is losing steam due to Chinese relations with western countries.Wong, 8 (Edward, New York Times, “At Exile Meeting, Tibetans Debate Independence” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/world/asia/22tibet.html?_r=0, 11/21/2008 CCC)

DHARAMSALA, India — In this Himalayan hill town, where Tibetan prayer flags flutter and red-robed monks study Buddha’s call for forbearance, talk is brewing of kicking off the world’s next separatist movement. Posters around town advertise the word “rangzen” — Tibetan for “independence .” Not in years has it been heard so much in the streets here, falling from the lips of members of the Tibetan diaspora whose frustration runs as deep as the mountain ravines of their homeland. Decades of dialogue with the Chinese government, they say, have failed. “Support for independence will definitely increase,” Dhondup Dorjee, 30, said, as he took a break from a heated discussion with fellow exiles to grab lunch in the cafeteria of the Tibetan hospital. “What are the pressures we can put on the Chinese? The pressures will come in any form.” The Tibetan exile movement, so long associated with the Dalai Lama and his “middle way,” has reached a crossroads. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, has called hundreds of representatives from the world’s 150,000 Tibetan exiles to a crisis meeting here this week. He wants people like Mr. Dorjee to speak their minds about whether a decades-old strategy of seeking a political reconciliation with China has failed. Mr. Dorjee is vice president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile organization that wants independence from China. The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile, based here in Dharamsala, have long advocated autonomy under Chinese rule, not outright independence. “It’s completely useless ,” Mr. Dorjee said of negotiating with the Chinese. “ There’s no point. We have been played.” Chinese officials now say in blunt terms that they will not accept the Dalai Lama’s demand for greater Tibetan autonomy, and have suggested that they would rather wait for the 73-year-old spiritual leader to die rather than reach an accord and allow him to return to Tibet. One of the biggest causes célèbres in the world, taken up by actors and rock stars, the movement is also losing international support because of China’s growing economic influence. It is time to adopt desperate measures, some Tibetans here say. At the conclusion of this week’s meeting, a majority of the 581 delegates could very well recommend to the Dalai Lama and the government in exile they start a formal independence movement — a situation that would alarm Chinese leaders while also

confirming their long-held suspicions that exiled Tibetan leaders would never settle for anything but separation from China. “We have totally surrendered before the people and let them express their views,” Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the exile government, said in an interview. “Obviously we’ve ruled out the violence approach. Other than that, anything is possible.” The other big issue looming over the conference is the question of the Dalai Lama’s successor. The Dalai Lama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has suffered bouts of ill health recently. Some Tibetans are now suggesting that he could break tradition and appoint his own successor rather than wait for his reincarnation to be discovered after his death. Many Tibetans fear that China will hijack the process of locating his successor, as it did with the Panchen Lama in 1995, unless the Dalai Lama uses his influence to anoint a new spiritual leader before he dies.The conference itself is being interpreted by many as the Dalai Lama’s attempt to wean the movement off his guidance — something that might have been unthinkable just years earlier. “I see this meeting as a symbolic transition from a Tibetan movement led by His Holiness to a Tibetan movement led by Tibetan people,” said Lobsang Sangay, a research fellow at Harvard Law School. The Tibet issue has reached a critical point for the exiles following a mass uprising of Tibetans across western China last spring. Protests and riots in which ethnic Han Chinese were killed prompted a harsh crackdown by the Chinese government. Envoys of the Dalai Lama and Chinese officials held two further rounds of talks in a series of negotiations that began in 2002, but the Chinese announced last week that they would never make any concessions on genuine autonomy for the six million people in Tibetan regions of China.

China prevents journalists from reporting onThe Tibet Post 14 (“Why freedom of speech matters: The silenced struggle in Tibet” http://www.thetibetpost.com/en/outlook/opinions-and-columns/3965-why-freedom-of-speech-matters-the-silenced-struggle-in-tibet, 4/02/2014 CCC)

However, no independent news or information still can be reported by the print media, broadcast media or new media in Chinese-controlled Tibet. However, news independent of the Chinese controlled media still cannot be reported within Tibet. Outside the country, especially in

India, where hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have found refuge, independent news is flourishing. Qunggyi, so called head of the Tibet Communications Administration claimed that "67.5 percent of Tibet's 3 million population have access to the Internet." His Holiness Dalai Lama repeated his calls on China to end the censorship, calling it immoral, "1.3 billion Chinese people have every right to know the reality. Once 1.3 billion people know reality, they also have the ability to judge what is right, what is wrong," he said, adding that censorship in a globalized world cannot exist "only within China." However, despite these difficult circumstances, the Chinese government still increases its grip, isolating Tibet even more from the outside world. The head of the Communist Party in Tibet, Chen Quanguo, has several time ordered local authorities to step up surveillance of all means of communication, particularly mobile phones and the Internet, in order to "maintain the public's interests and national security". In November 2013, he has vowed to "strike hard against the reactionary

propaganda of the splittists from entering Tibet." He has said the censorship campaign will be intensified with the Chinese government confiscating illegal satellite dishes, increasing monitoring of online content and making sure all telephone and internet users are registered using their real names. Chen has openly said that by thus ensuring that only it is seen and heard, the party would seek to expose the spiritual leader of Tibet His Holiness the Dalai Lama's "hypocrisy and deception" and his "reactionary plots". Tibet is a lesson for Taiwan and it's people. The people of Taiwan must wake-up it's so called "one country, two systems." The recent mass protests by Taiwanese students sent a clear message to Ma Ying-jeou's government not to sell out their precious island. Tibet's past and future have direct and pressing relevance to Taiwan because many Taiwanese people believe that Tibet's current fate

may well be their future too. The Paris based world media-watchdog, Reporters Without Borders has continued its condemnation at the blackout imposed by Chinese authorities in Tibet, preventing all media coverage of protest movements there. " Not only are foreign media organizations prevented from covering these events, but the authorities have also organized a veritable disinformation campaign, using pro-government media such

as the Global Times, which play down the disturbances and accuse the international community of interfering ." There have been arrests of those involved in writing a book on Tibet or post a content relating Tibet or speaking out in their defense. In addition, most of the Tibetan independent website blogs have been closed down and intellectuals cannot report freely on the situation in Tibet. There has been a particular targeting of religious and political opponents. Human rights defenders and the friends and relatives of the self-immolators have felt the heaviest of blows. The Central Tibetan Administration has many times urged international agencies and national governments to investigate on the events, particularly the biggest waves of political self-immolations in recent history,

but also the brutal crackdowns that continue in-spite of strong international condemnation. The strategy adopted by the Chinese government for more than last 50 years, namely cutting off certain places in Tibet from the media and online worlds in order to subdue them silently, is not new and has been applied elsewhere. Most of those arrested have been held incommunicado or in solitary confinement. They have had restricted access to lawyers and many have reported severe torture and other ill-treatment . One former political, Goshul Losang, who was arrested on 29 June 2010 by Machu County Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers. For about 5 months he was subjected to severe torture including pain-inducing injections, and deprived of sleep and food by the interrogation officers in Machu County. The India based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said that "Goshul Lobsang, who recently died of torture injuries, might have received injections designed to cause and exacerbate his pain while he was being tortured in detention. The use of torture methods to increase pain is consistent with other Chinese torture tactics. For example, the Chinese adopted Soviet torture techniques to inflict pain faster. When Chinese President Xi Jinping begins a recent three-day official visit to France, the Reporters Without Borders labeled him of a pure "enemy of freedom

of information," and condemned " China's growing harassment of journalists and its mistreatment of cyber- dissidents and activists who try to expose the constant human rights violations and persecution of human rights defenders." China is ranked 175th out of 180 countries in the press freedom index that Reporters Without Borders published in February this year and is more deserving than ever of inclusion in the world media watch-

dog list of Enemies of the Internet, the latest version of which was issued earlier March this year. According to the world media watch-dog, at least 74 netizens, including Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, and 30 journalists are currently detained in China, over 50 intellectuals, including writers in Tibet, making it the world's biggest prison for news providers. "Of all rights, the most important and fundamental are the political rights without which political change would be inhibited and democracy would be incapable of operating. Of these, freedom of speech is paramount. Without freedom of speech there can be no debate worthy of that name," Andrew Brons made, EU Agency for Fundamental Rights made recently. His comment again tells the world that the 'one country, two systems' formula is a total lie, and it's not a reality, because the regime against the freedom of speech and

every fundamental political rights. China needs the world as much as the world needs China. The world must understand the need to strengthen economic ties but also that the principles and values that sustain human rights, respect and dignity should be treated with equal or greater importance, without losing their moral compass and the universal values. We, the Tibetans in exile, are lucky that our basic human rights are generally respected. We have freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the right to peaceful protest against the Chinese regime. There is no fear of arbitrary detention or torture. As we enjoy these fundamental freedoms, which we can often take for granted. At the same time it is important to remember those, our kin, whose basic human rights are not respected. As a Tibetan, we must remind ourselves to remember those who sacrificed their lives for the just cause of Tibet

Tibet wants to be a free democratic nation The Tibet Post 14 (“Tibet’s journey towards democracy, peace with justice and dignity” http://www.thetibetpost.com/en/outlook/opinions-and-columns/4198-tibets-journey-towards-democracy-peace-with-justice-and-dignity, 8/03/2014 CCC)

Dharamshala: - The month of September – Tibetans in exile mark the 54th anniversary of Tibetan Democracy Day. It is a time when we remember and celebrate the historical day that efforts to transform the exiled Tibetan society into a democracy, began. We should remember the day and join with His Holiness the Dalai Lama's collective efforts and value-commitment to democracy sustained non-violent and peaceful resistance against the Chinese rule – making millions of people across the world to pay attention to what Tibetan people have to say about their cause and how Tibetans in exile live in a new democratic society. We also should never forget

the solidarity shown by the international organizations, including millions of individuals that stood side by side with our non-violent freedom struggle icon and demanded a united democratic society in exile. International pressures, marches and public defiance campaigns against failed

Chinese policies served to decisively weaken China to answer almost all the Tibet questions over nearly past six decades. Tibetans could not have made this journey alone. As we celebrate the democracy day on September 2nd this year, we once again do not only express our gratitude to our brothers and sisters inside Tibet for their unshakeable and tireless encouragement and strength but also the international community, particularly the great India and her people who have always shown support in our struggle for freedom. There is no question that Tibetan community in exile is today a better environment to live in than in Tibet. The democrat freedom we enjoy in

exile today will must taken as a "gift" for those in Tibet; it will never voluntarily give by the Chinese oppressors in our motherland. Our people fought tirelessly for more than 50 years to free themselves of the oppressive system of China. We also must remember those hundreds of "leaders" and "freedom fighters" who made immense sacrifices to give hope to the dreams and aspirations of the six million Tibetan peopl e . It is through their blood, sweat and sacrifice that we understand freedom is not a free. The haunting last words of those Tibetans, including 130 self-immolators remembered not only this day, but will forever echo through time. "The return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to his homeland Tibet." "Freedom for Tibet." "Tibetans must be united" to continue the fight. As we promise to follow in their footsteps, let us continue to remember their sacrifices by joining in celebrating democracy day. Perhaps you see images of flag-waving youth in Dharamshala or Washington or Brussels. Or maybe you heard the optimistic words of some politicians or journalists about happy life of Tibetans in Tibet. Yet one thing is clear once again—we heard the reports of heavy military crackdowns during the Shoton Festival in Lhasa city in recent days—although freedom and fundamental rights for human beings exists in the Himalayan region, that still does not actually exist for Tibetans. It is clear how much the Tibetan people want peace and democracy, but after hearing the glowing, yet often patronizing, clichés about ‘One country, two system’ that have been bandied about democracy in Honk Kong recently, the fact remains that Tibetans can never experience true democracy and freedom if it remains under the same occupation.

It is impossible for policymakers to know future consequences – allowing more rights violations will justify worse consequences in the future.Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy, 2001 (Winter, 18 J. Contemp. Health L. & Pol’y 95, p. 117)

The utilitarian principle justifies intentional, harmful acts against other humans to achieve a hoped-for benefit to a greater number of people. It is the wrong approach to public policy decisions . Its most notable

proponents have been responsible for much of the misery and strife of the last century. Experience has taught us time and again that public servants, even when crafting policies that appear wholly beneficent, can cause great har m (the so-

called "law of unintended consequences"). Humans lack the wisdom and foresight to completely understand the future ramifications of many action s . A father, for example, may believe that it is an entirely good thing to help his daughter with homework every day because they are spending time together and he is showing sincere interest in her life and schooling. By "helping" with homework, however, his daughter may be denied the mental struggle of searching for solutions on her own. She may not develop the mental

skills to solve tough math problems, for example, or to quickly find key concepts in reading selections. If even "good" actions can produce undesirable results, how much worse is the case when evil is tolerated in the name of some conjectural, future outcome?

Impact – Tibet – turns the affRestoring US Human Rights Credibility is key to restore US- Chinese Relations and give the US the ability to pressure China on its own human rights violations and enable reform International Relations Center 01 (Writer Margaret Huang, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, “U.S. Human Rights Policy Toward China”, Volume 6, Number 8, 2001)

Unfortunately, U .S. policy initiatives to promote human rights in the PRC have not matched the intensity of the rhetoric . Although the U.S. government has raised human rights concerns in summits and other official meetings,

these bilateral overtures have generally failed to evoke a response from Chinese authorities , indicating that the Chinese do not take the U.S. interventions seriously. This perception is understood when contrasting Washington’s responses to Beijing’s refusal to comply with its obligations under two separate international agreements. In 1996, the Clinton administration announced its intentions to apply economic sanctions against China for failing to protect intellectual property rights (IPR) as obligated under a 1995 agreement. Under this pressure, China backed down and undertook immediate steps to enforce the agreement. But the same U.S. government rejected any linkage between economic sanctions and China’s violations of

international human rights treaties, which have the same binding force as the IPR agreement. To strengthen U.S. human rights policy toward China, Washington must demonstrate that it applies the same principles and standards to China as it does to other countries. Beijing has protested that the U.S. singles out the PRC for scrutiny while ignoring violations committed by U.S. allies. Many of China’s critics in the U.S. have focused on the Communist Party as the cause of China’s human rights violations. This emphasis on ideology instead of international human rights norms reduces U.S. credibility. During the congressional debate over approving China’s accession to the WTO, several opponents cited Beijing’s human rights violations and its communist leadership as justification for denying China entry into the organization. Yet these arguments have not been applied to other

countries seeking to join the WTO. U.S. policymakers are at a disadvantage when pressuring China to uphold international human rights law, because the U.S. has failed to ratify many of the same international treaties. China and the U.S. have each ratified one of the two major covenants on human rights. However, China has ratified the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child

(CRC), neither of which has been ratified by the United States. By failing to accept the human rights obligations under these treaties, Washington risks further charges of hypocrisy when prodding China to improve its human rights record . Multilateral approaches to addressing China’s human rights record are important, because Chinese authorities react seriously to them. For example, for the last several years at the UNCHR, U.S. officials have failed to overcome China’s opposition to a resolution on its human rights problems. The Chinese government has undertaken fervent campaigns to avoid a UN censure, asking countries to engage in bilateral dialogues about human rights concerns instead of supporting a UN resolution. PRC officials have even offered development assistance and trade opportunities to countries that support its position. These efforts, exacerbated by the failure of U.S. officials to effectively solicit cosponsorship of the resolution, demonstrate the Chinese government’s determination to avoid international criticism. Another multilateral approach slighted by Washington is the use of development assistance through the international financial institutions (IFIs) to encourage reform. Under the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. government is required to advance international human rights through its voting power in the IFIs. However, China is the World Bank’s biggest client, with loans of $1.4 billion approved in the year 2000 alone, because the U.S. and its allies have failed to ensure that World Bank loans are conditional upon a country’s respect for human rights norms. Toward a New Foreign Policy Key Recommendations * The Bush administration should make an early and strong commitment to human rights as a priority in U.S.

foreign policy. * Washington should establish a consistent human rights policy that is applied equally to all countries regardless of ideological or economic interests.* The U.S. should pursue multiple approaches to promoting human rights in China, including multilateral efforts and incentives for reform. There are several key measures that the Bush administration should adopt right away. First, Secretary of State Powell should appoint a strong Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He should also appoint senior-level advisors with substantial human rights expertise in the other functional and regional bureaus. Increased funding for the human rights bureau and for human rights initiatives would also be a significant sign of commitment by the new administration. Second, the Bush administration should demonstrate its acceptance of international human rights norms by submitting unapproved international human rights treaties to the Senate for ratification, in particular, CEDAW and

the CRC. By joining some of its closest allies—including France, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan—in adopting these agreements, the U.S. would reinforce the message to China and other countries that human rights are universally

accepted and applied. Washington should also establish clear human rights principles to guide all foreign policy. Human rights concerns should be addressed in summit meetings with all countries, including U.S. allies and trading partners. If the threat of economic sanctions is used to pressure one country on its human rights record, then the U.S. should apply the same policy criteria to all other states. Within the IFIs, the U.S. should work with other donor countries to establish explicit human rights

criteria for any country seeking development assistance or foreign investment, and these criteria should be uniformly applied. After fully integrating human rights concerns into foreign policy, Washington should apply these principles to China. The first step in this effort should be to seek cosponsors at the UNCHR for a resolution concerning China’s human rights record. Beijing will take a resolution much more seriously if it is viewed as a multilateral response. Another opportunity for a multilateral approach to human rights is the October 2001 meeting of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) members, to be hosted by China. The U.S. should use this high-level meeting to work with other countries, particularly U.S. allies Japan and South Korea, to address human rights concerns across the region. It is significant to note that serious multilateral pressure on Chinese authorities has already resulted in some progress regarding human rights. For example, China’s decision to sign the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1997 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1998 stemmed from international pressure at the UNCHR. Each year before the UNCHR has convened, China has usually released a few political prisoners or announced new steps being undertaken to meet international obligations. In the most recent case, China ratified the ICESCR this year, albeit with reservations. PRC officials have also indicated a renewed willingness to discuss future visits to Chinese prisons by the International Red Cross. These overtures are again being offered just before the UNCHR meetings and as China prepares its bid to host the Olympics in 2008. To ensure that these promises are kept, the international community should keep up the pressure and hold China to its commitments. On the bilateral front, human rights should be consistently addressed as a key concern in all summits and official meetings. The Chinese government has recently offered to renew the bilateral dialogue on human rights. This step should be welcomed as providing an additional forum for discussion, though not substituting for other actions. The U.S. should continue to press the Chinese authorities to meet with the Dalai Lama to discuss Tibet’s future. A new but potentially important mechanism is the Congressional-Executive Commission on the People’s Republic of China (CECC), established in October 2000. Created by Congress in the law extending permanent normal trade relations status to China, the CECC has a mandate to monitor China’s compliance with international human rights law. Each year, the CECC must issue a report to the president and Congress that includes recommendations for executive or legislative action. To enable the CECC to meet its mandate, the administration and Congress must make this initiative a high priority, and funding for the commission should be substantially increased. The 23 appointed members of the CECC should be senior representatives of their institutions, and they should have credibility with the Chinese government to ensure that both they and the commission staff will be able to visit the country and do firsthand reporting. CECC members should also seek cooperation with similar institutions in other countries. The CECC offers the opportunity to work constructively with China on human rights concerns. The CECC could recommend or even provide technical assistance or financial support to the Chinese government in the areas of legal reform and human rights implementation. Labor rights is an issue in which the U.S. and

China share many concerns, some of which will be exacerbated by China’s imminent accession to the WTO. By approaching this issue as equals with lessons to learn from one another, the U.S. could improve overall relations with China as well as advance an important international human rights agenda . Promoting human rights in China is clearly in the best interest of the United States. Working to enhance the human rights situation in the PRC reflects democratic values and supports those inside China seeking political and social reform. In addition, by encouraging China to uphold its obligations under human rights treaties, the U.S. will likely strengthen China’s commitment to implementing other international agreements on issues of trade and security.

Aff

UQ China reforming human rights now Holden 14. [“Activists urge China to abolish 'black jails'” Al-Jazeera- Human Rights July 12th 2014 URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/07/activists-urge-china-abolish-black-jails-201471011532461581.html]

The government's pledge to dismantle re-education through labour centres is part of slow-motion moves towards reform of law enforcement and punishment, but it is not clear if these moves will be extended any time soon, he said. "One can speculate about the forces at work inside the government that have on the one hand produced this trend and on the other resisted it and made it so slow ." Perry Link, a widely respected scholar on the imprisonment of China's leading activists for human rights and democratic change, said: "People in China call for the

shutting down of re-education camps and black jails quite a bit." E ven some reform-minded government officials have dared to publicly echo these appeals. "But others inside the government - especially at the top - are most worried about maintaining power ," he added, "and want to continue with arbitrary arrest of critics, use of black jails, torture, extra-legal intimidation and muggings, and even 'accidental' killings - all in order to stay on top."

US cant solve

Hypocrisy China not interested in fixing human rights abuses until the US does Guardian 16. The Guardian is the 3rd most read newspaper in the world. [“China accuses US of rape and murder after criticism of human rights record” March 10th 2016 The Guardian, United Nations URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/10/china-attacks-us-hypocrisy-un-human-rights-council]

China has strongly rejected US-led criticism of its human rights record at the UN Human Rights Counci l on Thursday, accusing the United States of hypocrisy and crimes including the rape and murder of civilians. “The US is notorious for prison abuse at Guantánamo prison, its gun violence is rampant, racism is its deep-rooted malaise,” Chinese diplomat Fu Cong told the Council, using unusually blunt language. “The United States conducts large-scale extra- territorial eavesdropping , uses drone s to attack other countrie s ’ innocent civilians, its troops on foreign soil commit rape and murder of local people. It conducts kidnapping overseas and uses black prisons .” Fu was responding to a joint statement by the United States and 11 other countries, who criticised China’s crackdown on human rights and its detentions of lawyers and activists. “These actions are in contravention of China’s own laws and international commitments,” said US Ambassador Keith Harper, who read out the statement backed by Australia, Japan, and nine northern European countries. “These extra-territorial actions are unacceptable, out of step with the expectations of the international community, and a challenge to the rule-based international order.” Harper read the statement straight after UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein gave his main annual speech to the council. He recalled his message to China in mid-February, when he

cited a “very worrying pattern” of detentions. Fu said Zeid should “refrain from making subjective comments not backed up by real facts”. He also criticized Japan’s support for the joint statement, saying Japan had refused to take responsibility for conscripting 100,000 “comfort women” in Asian countries during the second world war. In China, police have detained about 250 human rights lawyers, legal assistants, and activists since a nationwide crackdown began last July, although many have subsequently been released. Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said the message delivered by Harper was the first collective joint statement on China in the 10 history of the council. “The statement shows that while President Xi may think he can eradicate dissent at home, the world stands with embattled human rights defenders across China,” she said in a statement.

Us human rights abuses are worse than china Mu 12 (Mu Xuequan, Xinhua.net editor, “China issues report on human rights in the U.S.,” Xinhua, english.news.cn., http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-05/25/c_131611391.htm, 05/25/2012)atn

BEIJING, May 25 (Xinhua) -- China on Friday responded to a recent U.S. government report on China's human rights practices by issuing its own report on human rights issues in the United Sta tes. The "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011" was released by the Information Office of the State Council, China's Cabinet, in response to the "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011" issued by the U.S. State

Department on May 24. It was the 13th annual report published by China in response to U.S. attacks. The U.S. report is "full of overly critical remarks on human rights conditions in nearly 200 countries and regions, as well as distortions and accusations concerning human rights causes in China. However, the United States has turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and remained silent about it," China's report said. The "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011" is intended to reveal the "true human rights situation" of the United States to the world and "urge the United States to confront its own actions ," the report said. The Chinese report covers human rights issues related to six topics: life, property and personal security; civil and political rights; economic, social and cultural rights; racial discrimination; the rights of women and

children; and U.S. violations of human rights in other countries. The facts contained in the report are a small yet illustrative fraction of the United States' dismal record on its own human rights situation, it said. The United States' tarnished human rights record has left it in no state -- whether on a moral, political or legal basis -- to act as the world's "human rights justice," to place itself above other countries and release the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices year after year to accuse and blame other countries, according to the report. China, in the report, advised the U.S. government to look

squarely at its own grave human rights problems, to stop the "unpopular practices" of taking human rights as a political instrument for interfering in other countries' internal affairs, tarnishing the images of other nations and seeking its own strategic interests, and to cease using double standards on human rights and pursuing hegemony under the pretext of human rights.

FailsHR diplomacy fails – structural issues in the US curb it’s appealBell 96 (Daniel A., taught political philosophy for three years at the National University of Singapore. In 1994-1995 he was a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. In January 1996 he joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong to teach political philosophy. He is the author of Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford 1993) and the co-author of Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (St. Martin's Press, NY; Macmillan/St. Antony's College, Oxford 1995, “The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights: Reflections on an East West Dialogue”, http://faculty.smcm.edu/jwschroeder/Web/ETHR1002/Global_Jutice_Readings_files/13.BellEastAsianChallenge.pdf) RR

Second, it is a widespread belief within the United States--currently the dominant voice on the world diplomatic stage--that

exporting US political practices and institutions is necessary for the promotion of human rights abroad. As

Stephen Young, former Assistant Dean at the Harvard Law School puts it, Many Americans seem to believe that the constitutional pattern of governance in the United States today--as formalized in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights--is a necessary prerequisite for protecting human rights. Thus, they evaluate the performance of other

countries in the field of human rights by comparing their conduct with the standards of American politics. 34 It may well have been feasible to act on this belief in the post World War II era, when the United States was powerful enough to insist upon human rights norms. The US capacity to dictate appropriate forms of government to Japan in the immediate post World War II period is a

classic example. Today, however, the relative economic and military strength of [End Page 653] East Asia means that the United States must now rely primarily on moral authority to promote human rights in Asia . However, several factors undermine US moral authority in this respect. Widely publicized domestic social problems in the United States such as high rates of drug use, collapsing families, rampant crime, growing economic inequalit y , and alienation from the political process no longer make the United States the attractive political model that it may once have been. The widespread sentiment that such domestic ills are at least partly attributable to the excessive pursuit of individual rights at the cost of common social goods further undermines the attractiveness of the particular human rights regime (the priority of civil and political rights over social and economic rights) often promoted by US human rights activists

Recent election of human rights abusers in the UN decks credMarcus 3/3 (Lori, Campaign to Oust Russia, Others, From UN Human Rights Council, The Jewish Press, http://www.jewishpress.com/news/campaign-to-oust-russia-others-from-un-human-rights-council/2014/03/03/)

China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba were among the countries who won three-year

seats on the Geneva-based council. On the same day that Russia issued an ultimatum to Ukraine either to hand

over Crimea or prepare for a Russian military assault on that sovereign nation, the Russian ambassador to the United

Nations thanked delegates for supporting Russia’s election to the United Nations Human Rights Council. During the opening session of the UNHRC, on Monday, March 3, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov thanked delegates for supporting Russia’s election to the Council. He said that vote was “an acknowledgement of our country’s constructive approach to this sphere of

multilateral cooperation.” He added, that “the protection of human and civil rights and freedoms is a basic priority.” The irony was

apparently too muc h even for longstanding residents of the Orwellian world of the U.N . The response by a coalition of government members, non-governmental organizations and human rights activists was to kick off a global campaign to suspend the memberships of Russia and fellow human rights abusers China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. The four took their seats Monday as the UNHRC’s newest members . They

based their effort on Article 8 of the UNHRC charter, which permits the suspension of member states guilty of gross and systematic violations of human rights. There is a precedent. In 2011, Libya was suspended after a similar

campaign was led by the Geneva-based human rights NGO UN Watch, which is also spearheading this effort. “Hypocrisy on this scale undermines the credibility of the human rights council and of the United Nations as a whole,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. “The UN’s top human rights body is supposed to protect victims and hold the world’s worst

perpetrators to account, not turn them into judges and prosecutors.” European Parliament vice-president Edward McMillan-Scott,

Canadian parliamentarian Irwin Cotler, Baroness Ludford of the European Parliament, and former MP of Hungary Matyas Eörsi have joined NGOs and rights activists from around the world to call for the UN to suspend the four abusers from the 47-nation body. Irwin Cotler, member of Canadian Parliament, former Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada joined with other parliamentary leaders who signed UN Watch’s #dictatorfreeHRC campaign to suspend China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudia Arabia from the UNHRC.

Colter said, “The membership of China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia on the Human Rights Council constitutes a standing repudiation of the international struggle for human rights, and a betrayal of the victims. It makes a mockery o f both the UNHRC and the purported commitment to human rights of the many countries who cast votes for the human rights reprobates in question.” Matyas Eörsi, a former member of the Hungarian parliament and the former president of the Council of Europe

Parliamentary Assembly, spoke harshly about the membership in the UNHRC. “With such members in the Human Rights Council, the UN continues to remain a lame duck. We have no hope from the UN. As long as the Russian Federation, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China sit in the Human Rights Council, we Ukrainians, we Cuban dissidents, we

Chinese Christians and we Saudi Arabian women cannot seek for any support by the UN.”

HR Diplomacy fails – US authority has plummetedWeisbrot 09 (Mark, Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy, “Washington's Lost Credibility on Human Rights”, Center of Economic and Policy Research, http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/washingtons-lost-credibility-on-human-rights) RR

The U.S. State Department's annual human rights report got an unusual amount of criticism this year. This time the center-left coalition government of Chile was notable in joining other countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela, and China – who have had more rocky relations with Washington – in questioning the "moral authority" of the U.S. government's judging other countries' human rights practices. It's a reasonable question, and the fact that more democratic governments are asking it may signal a tipping point. Clearly a state that is responsible for such high-profile torture and abuses as took place at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the regular killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has reserved for itself the right to kidnap people and send them to prisons in other countries to be tortured ("extraordinary rendition") has a credibility problem on human rights issues. Although President Obama has pledged to close down the prison at Guantanamo and outlaw torture by U.S. officials, he has so far decided not to abolish the practice of "extraordinary rendition," and is escalating the war in Afghanistan. But this tipping point may go beyond any differences – and they are quite significant – between the current administration and its predecessor. In the past, Washington was able to position itself as an important judge of human rights practices despite being complicit or directly participating in some of the worst, large-scale human rights atrocities of the post-World War II era – in Vietnam, Indonesia, Central America, and other places. This makes no sense from a strictly logical point of view, but it could persist primarily because the United States was judged not on how it treated persons outside its borders but within them. Internally, the United States has had a relatively well-developed system of the rule of law, trial by jury, an independent judiciary, and other constitutional guarantees (although these did not extend to African-Americans in most of the Southern United States prior to the 1960s civil rights reforms). Washington was able to contrast these conditions with those of its main adversary during the Cold War – the Soviet Union. The powerful influence of the United States over the international media helped ensure that this was the primary framework under which human rights were presented to most of the world. The Bush Administration's "shredding of the Constitution" at home and overt support for human rights abuses abroad has fostered not only a change in image but perhaps the standards by which "the judge" will henceforth be judged. One example may help illustrate the point: China has for several years responded to the State Department's human rights report by publishing its own report on the United States . It includes a catalogue of social ills in the United States, including crime, prison and police abuse, racial and gender discrimination, poverty and inequality. But the last section is entitled "On the violation of human rights in other nations." The argument is that the abuse of people in other countries – including the more than one million people who have been killed as a result of the United States'

illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq – must now be taken into account when evaluating the human rights record of the United States. With this criterion included, a country such as China – which does not have a free press, democratic elections, or other guarantees that western democracies treasure – can claim that it is as qualified to judge the United States on human rights as vice versa. U.S.-based human rights organizations will undoubtedly see the erosion of Washington's credibility on these issues as a loss – and understandably so, since the United States is still a powerful country, and they hope to use this power to pressure other countries on human rights issues..

Democracies bad/failDemocracies historically go to war.Layne 7, Chair of Intelligence and National Security @ Texas A&M (Christopher, fellow @ Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, J.D. from South Carolina, PhD in PoliSci from UC Berkeley, “American Empire: A Debate”, pg. 94)

Wilsonian ideology drives the American Empire because its proponents posit that the United States must use its military power to extend democracy abroad. Here, the ideology of Empire rests on assumptions that are not supported by the facts. One reason the architects of Empire champion democracy promotion is because they believe in the so-called democratic peace theory, which holds that democratic states do not fight other democracies. Or as President George W. Bush put it with his customary

eloquence, "democracies don't war; democracies are peaceful."136 The democratic peace theory is the probably the most overhyped and undersupported "theory" ever to be concocted by American academics. In

fact, it is not a theory at all. Rather it is a theology that suits the conceits of Wilsonian true believers-especially the neoconservatives who have been advocating American Empire since the early 1990s. As serious scholars have shown , however, the historical record does not support the democratic peace theory .131 On the contrary, it shows that democracies do not act differently toward other democracies than they do toward nondemocratic states. When important national interests are at stake, democracies not only have threatened to use force against other democracies, but, in fact, democracies have gone to war with other democracies .

DPT fails – no mutual trust and countries ignore each other’s interests.Rosato 3, Professor of PoliSci @ Notre Dame (Sebastian Rosato, PhD in PoliSci from UChicago, Director of the Notre Dame International Security Program, Fellow @ Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Research Fellow @ Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory”, American Political Science Review Vol. 97, No. 4 November 2003, http://www.metu.edu.tr/~utuba/Rosato.pdf)

The available evidence suggests that democracies do not have a powerful inclination to treat each other with trust and respect when their interests clash. Instead, they tend to act like any other pair of states, bargaining hard, issuing threats, and , if they believe it is warranted, using military force. Cold War Interventions.

American interventions to destabilize fellow democracies in the developing world pr ovide good evidence that democracies do not always treat each other with trust and respect when they have a conflict of interest. In each case, Washington’s commitment to containing the spread of communism overwhelmed any respect for fellow democracies. Although none of the target states had turned to communism or joined the communist bloc, and were led by what were at most left-leaning democratically elected governments, American officials chose neither to trust nor to respect them, preferring to destabilize them by force and replace them with autocratic (but anticommunist) regimes rather than negotiate with them in good faith or secure their support by diplomatic means (Table 2). Three features of these cases deserve

emphasis. First, all the regimes that the United States sought to undermine were democratic. In the cases of Guatemala, British Guyana, Brazil, and Chile democratic processes were fairly well established. Iran, Indonesia, and Nicaragua were fledgling democracies but Mossadeq, Sukarno, and the Sandinistas could legitimately claim to be the first proponents of democracy in their respective countries. Every government with the exception of the Sandinistas was replaced by a succession of American-backed dictatorial regimes.

Second, in each case the clash of interests between Washington and the target governments was not particularly severe. These should, then, be easy cases for democratic peace theory since trust and respect are most likely to be determinative when the dispute is minor. None of the target governments were communist, and although some of them pursued leftist policies there was no indication that they intended to impose a communist model or that they were actively courting the Soviet Union. In spite of the limited scope of disagreement, respect for democratic forms of government was consistently subordinated to an expanded conception of

national security. Third, there is good evidence that s upport for democracy was often sacrificed in the name of American economic interests. At least some of the impetus for intervention in Iran came in response to the nationalization of the oil industry, the United Fruit Company pressed for action in Guatemala, International Telephone and Telegraph urged successive administrations to intervene in Brazil and Chile, and Allende’s efforts to nationalize the copper industry fueled demands that the Nixon administration

destabilize his government. In sum, the record of American interventions in the developing world suggests that democratic trust and respect has often been subordinated to security and economic interests . Democratic peace theorists generally agree that these interventions are examples of a democracy using force against other democracies, but they offer two

reasons why covert interventions should not count against the normative logic. The first reason is that the target states were not democratic enough to be trusted and respected (Forsythe 1992; Russett 1993, 120–24). This claim is not entirely convincing. Although the target states may not have been fully democratic, they were more democratic than the regimes that preceded and succeeded them and were democratizing further . Indeed, in every case

American action brought more autocratic regimes to power. The second reason is that these interventions were covert, a fact believed by democratic peace theorists to reveal the strength of their normative argument. It was precisely because these states were democratic that successive administrations had to act covertly rather than openly initiate military operations. Knowing that their actions were

illegitimate, and fearing a public backlash, American officials decided on covert action (Forsythe 1992; Russett 1993, 120–24). This defense fails to address some important issues. To begin with, it ignores the fact that American public officials, that is, the individuals that democratic peace theory claims are most likely to abide by liberal norms, showed no respect for fellow democracies. Democratic peace theorists will respond that the logic holds, however, because these officials were restrained from using open and massive force by the liberal attitudes of the mass public. This is a debatable assertion; after all, officials may have opted for covert and limited force for a variety of reasons other than public opinion, such as operational costs and the expected international reaction. Simply because the use of force was covert and limited, this does not mean that its nature was determined by

public opinion. But even if it is true that officials adopted a covert policy to shield themselves from a potential public backlash, the logic still has a crucial weakness: The fact remains that the United States did not treat fellow democracies with trust or respect. Ultimately, the logic stands or falls by its predictive power, that is, whether democracies treat each other with respect. If they do, it is powerful; if they do not, it is weakened. It does not matter why they do not treat each other with respect, nor does it matter if some or all of the population wants to treat the other state with respect; all that matters is whether respect is extended. To put it another way, we can come up with several reasons to explain why respect is not extended, and we can always find social groups that oppose the use of military force against another democracy, but whenever we find several examples of a democracy using military force against other democracies, the trust and respect mechanism, and therefore the normative logic, fails an

important test.6 Great Powers. Layne (1994) and Rock (1997) have found further evidence that democracies do not treat each other with trust and respect in their analyses of diplomatic crises involving Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Layne examines four prominent cases in which rival democracies almost went to war with one another and asks whether the crises were resolved because of mutual trust and

respect. His conclusion offers scant support for the normative logic: “ In each of these crises, at least one of the democratic states involved was prepared to go to war. ... In each of the four crises, war was avoided not because of the ‘live and let live’spirit of peaceful dispute resolution at democratic peace theory’s core, but because of realist factors ” (Layne 1994, 38).7 Similarly, Rock finds little evidence that shared liberal values helped resolve any of the crises between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. In addition, his analyses of the turn-of-the-century “great rapprochement” and naval arms control during the 1920s show that even in cases where liberal states

resolved potentially divisive issues in a spirit of accommodation, shared liberal values had only a limited effect. In both cases peace was overdetermined and “liberal values and democratic institutions were not the only factors inclining Britain and the United States toward peace, and perhaps not even the dominant ones” (Rock 1997, 146).8 In

sum, the trust and respect mechanism does not appear to work as specified. Shared democratic values provide no guarantee that states will both trust and respect one another. Instead, and contrary to the normative logic’s claims, when serious

conflicts of interest arise between democracies there is little evidence that they will be inclined to accommodate each other’s demands or refrain from engaging in hard line policies. \

TIBET AFF

Impact turnsInternational human rights promotion leads to warBaxi 5 [Upendra Baxi, Professor of Law, University of Warwick, Fall 1998, accessed 8/1/05, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems]

The post-modernist critique of human rights further maintains that the telling of large global stories ("metanarratives") is less a

function of emancipation as it as an aspect of the politics of intergovernmental desire that ingests the politics of resistance.

Put another way, meta-narratives serve to co-opt into mechanisms and processes of governance the languages of human rights such that bills of rights may adorn many a military constitutionalism with impunity and that socalled human rights commissions may thrive upon state/regime sponsored violations. Not surprisingly, the more severe the human rights violation, the more the power elites declare their loyalty to the regime of human rights. The near-universality of ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), for

example, betokens no human liberation of women. Rather, it endows the state with the power to tell more Nietschzean lies. n68 All too often, human rights languages become stratagems of imperialistic foreign policy through military invasions as well as through global economic diplomacy. n69 Superpower diplomacy at the United Nations is not averse to causing untold suffering through sanctions whose manifest aim is to serve the future of human rights. n70 The United States, the solitary superpower at the end of the millennium, has made sanctions for the promotion of human rights abroad a gourmet feast at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

US pressuring China on human rights tanks relationsGarthoff 97 [Raymond Garthoff, “Relations With the Great Powers: Russia, Japan, China”, Brookings Institution, p. http://www.brookings.edu/articles/1997/spring_globalgovernance_garthoff.aspx]

The first policy, born of a campaign promise to stop "coddling dictators" in Beijing, involved a single-minded focus on promoting human rights in China. It was based on the assumption that only intense pressure, principally through the threat to revoke China's most-favored-nation trade status, could force Beijing to improve its human rights record. High-level contact with China was to be withheld until progress had been achieved.

By the end of 1993, however, it had become increasingly evident that China was not succumbing to the American pressure on human rights and that other aspects of the relationship warranted attention .

At that point the administration unveiled its second China policy—one that it called "comprehensive engagement." It entailed more frequent exchange of cabinet-level visits to discuss a broader bilateral agenda. The aim was to show that, on these other issues, the United States and China might find areas of cooperation and thus bring the overall relationship into better balance. The

problem was that the overall purpose of "engagement" was never effectively conveyed to Beijing. Even after the Clinton administration withdrew its threat to revoke Beijing's most-favored-nation status in the name of continued economic engagement with

China, many Chinese concluded that "engagement" was simply a euphemism for containment and that American policy was really intended to keep China weak and divided so that it would never seriously challenge American preeminence in Asia. The 1995 controversy over Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui's visit to the United States, and the subsequent Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, showed how deeply China had come to mistrust American intentions. From Beijing's perspective, the visa granted to Lee Teng-hui showed that Washington now planned to promote the independence of Taiwan as part of its overall strategy of containing the rise of Chinese power.”

Specifically – domestic political considerations block any chances of increasing relations if US pressures China on human rightsGarthoff 97 [Raymond Garthoff, “Relations With the Great Powers: Russia, Japan, China”, Brookings Institution, p. http://www.brookings.edu/articles/1997/spring_globalgovernance_garthoff.aspx]

And other sensitive issues could very likely flare up again in the months ahead. Actions by Taipei that are interpreted in China as moves toward independence could again provoke Beijing to bring military pressure to bear against Taiwan. Evidence of Chinese exports of missile technology could trigger pressure to apply the economic sanctions required by U.S. law.

Sales of other kinds of military technology to what the United States regards as "rogue states" could also produce serious tensions in Sino-American relations. And, finally, dramatic violations of human rights in China—especially the suppression of peaceful protests in a major Chinese city, a crackdown on ethnic separatists in Tibet or Xinjiang, or the harsh sentencing of political dissidents—could derail the plans for Sino-American summit meetings. Moreover, the two countries' ability to deal with these issues constructively will be limited by domestic political considerations. Now that Deng Xiaoping is dead, Jiang Zemin will be preoccupied with consolidating his own power and may be reluctant to take controversial initiatives toward the United States. And although Clinton won a decisive reelection victory last November, he must anticipate continued Republican criticism of his China policy, especially given the emerging scandals involving Asian financial contributions to his election campaign.