A police officer patrols with his gun on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in a file photo. Feng Li/Getty Images
Limin Zhou
A coalition of human rights organizations and Chinese diaspora groups is calling on Prime Minister Mark Carney to raise, at the highest level, China’s human rights abuses, including Beijing’s transnational repression in Canada.
In a Jan. 9 letter, the Coalition on Human Rights in China urged Carney to use the trip—the first by a Canadian prime minister since 2017—to “signal a clear intention to put human rights at the centre of Canada’s relationship with China.” Carney is scheduled to visit China from Jan. 13 to Jan. 17 and meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang, and business leaders. Talks are expected to focus on trade, energy, agriculture, and international security.
“Canada’s relationship with China is certainly one of the most crucial foreign policy priorities you face as Prime Minister,” the coalition wrote, while warning that Beijing’s human rights record requires “very serious and deliberate attention” and a comprehensive, coordinated strategy.
Cheuk Kwan, co-chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China, said Canada lacks such a strategy. “It’s time to put human rights at the forefront of that relationship,” he said, calling it “the only principled, but also pragmatic, path forward.”
The coalition said it has documented intensified repression of activists inside and outside China. It cited cases involving Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai; activist Chow Hang-tung; Canadian Joe Tay; Uyghur-Canadian Huseyin Celil; pro-democracy activist Wang Bingzhang; detained Falun Gong practitioners with family ties to Canada; Tibetan Buddhist leader the Panchen Lama; and numerous Christian pastors.
Simone Hanchet of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights said past failures to prioritize human rights have had “disastrous consequences for individual Canadians.”
Separately, Human Rights Watch urged Carney to make human rights a “key focus” of the visit. Deputy Asia director Maya Wang said China’s “deepening repression” threatens Canada’s values, calling on the prime minister to address forced labour, the imprisonment of rights defenders, and Beijing’s targeting of critics abroad, including in Canada.