Shadow Human Rights Summit: A Voice for the Voiceless

The 12th Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy – February 18, 2020 

2020 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy

Human rights heroes to spotlight Algeria, China, Cuba, Hong Kong, Iran, Malawi, Mauritania, Pakistan, and Venezuela. This is the 12th time that human rights defenders are gathering at this important shadow human rights summit.  It was broadcast live on February 18, 2020 over the live stream video below.

Cuba was highlighted during the summit with a presentation by Laritza Diversent of Cubalex. She described how her legal aide service was shut down by the secret police, and how the dictatorship made threats against her person for being a human rights defender. Below is a quote taken twitter earlier today.

"In Cuba, the public prosecutor interrogated us as if we were terrorists. We feared having a trial without due process. We feared ending up in prison and not being able to do our work." #GS2020

- Laritza Diversent, Cuban human rights lawyer and activist pic.twitter.com/VNMi7YgwGy

— The Geneva Summit (@GenevaSummit) February 18, 2020

Liberal International also reported over Twitter on her presentation and the fact that free legal advice is not one of the 240 services permitted by the Cuban government.

Cuban #HumanRights lawyer & activist, Laritza Diversent, addresses hundreds attending the @GenevaSummit where she explains that in #Cuba, "being a lawyer that offers free legal advice is NOT among the 240 services that citizens are 'allowed' to offer."#GS2020 #LIHRC pic.twitter.com/KaB7hZxQKK

— Liberal International (@liberalinternat) February 18, 2020

Venezuela was featured with political leaders of the interim government, intellectuals, and Rosa Orozco, the mother of Geraldine Moreno, a Venezuelan martyr.  The 23 year old university student and athlete, who was shot repeatedly in the face by Bolivarian National Guard members on February 19, 2014 during a protest in Venezuela. Geraldine died three days later on February 22, 2014. Six years later, her mom continues to demand justice.

“I lost my daughter and endured the absence of justice. This is my double tragedy." #GS2020 #Venezuela

- Rosa Orozco, mother of Geraldine Moreno, killed by the Bolivarian National Guard in Venezuela pic.twitter.com/5kX4YVO6vh

— The Geneva Summit (@GenevaSummit) February 18, 2020

This was Geraldine. This is the human face of repression in Venezuela multiplied thousands of times.

Tiananmen Square at 29: Remembrance and a call to action

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera

Tonight on the 29th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre we gathered by the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, DC and at 8:00pm began a vigil for all those killed. Survivors gathered and gave their testimony. 

We listened to Fang Zheng, who lost both his legs after they were crushed by a Chinese tank 29 years ago. Last month, like tonight, he was introduced by Yang Jianli, another survivor of Tiananmen at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Tonight I listened to Cui Jian's song, Piece of Red Cloth, that he played for protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen protests, it remains a powerful song today.

In Hong Kong over a 115,000 people gathered in a candlelight vigil in remembrance of those killed on June 4, 1989 in China.

JUST IN: 115,000 attend Hong Kong's #Tiananmen Massacre vigil, organisers say https://t.co/IAg2MnOwp8 [Correction] #june4 #tiananmen pic.twitter.com/MZROBH8uRC

— Hong Kong Free Press (@HongKongFP) June 4, 2018

Following the June 4, 1989 crackdown and massacre on June 5th one man stood up to a line of tanks involved in the Tiananmen Square slaughter to express his moral outrage and blocked them. At the same time it is important to remember that the driver in that lead tank refused to run over the protester. Both individuals are heroes and both their fates remain unknown.

The 2004 Frontline Documentary Tankman explores the significance of this act, and attempted to discover what happened. Now Initiatives for China has a campaign underway to petition the Chinese government to reveal the truth of what happened to the two Tiananmen tank men. Please sign the petition to find out what happened to the tank men.

Dr. Yang Jianli’s Speech at “Remembering The Legacy Of Liu Xiaobo”

Vigil in Washington D.C. for Chinese dissident, human rights defender and Nobel Laureate who died after prolonged imprisonment in China for nonviolently advocating for freedom in China. Yang Jianli spoke during the event organized by Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Marion Smith (VOC), Dr. Yang Jianli (Initiatives for China), John Suarez (FCF)

Dr. Yang Jianli’s Speech at “Remembering The Legacy Of Liu Xiaobo” 

Hosted by Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

Monday, July 17th, 2017 at Victims of Communism Memorial

 By Yang Jianli

Tonight we mourn the tragic passing of Liu Xiaobo, a great loss to the people of China, indeed, to the entire humanity.

Liu Xiaobo was not only the best known freedom and democracy fighter of China, but, in life as well as in death, he represents the best of what China can ever be.

In April 1989, when the Tiananmen democracy movement just broke out, he returned to Beijing from New York and became the most important intellectual leader of the movement. After the Tiananmen Massacre, he shouldered both moral and political responsibilities and continued to fight from inside China while many others left the country and even abandoned the movement. He was in and out prison and spent half of the past 28 years after the Tiananmen Massacre in incarceration. Never wavering in spirit, he shared the sufferings of his compatriots and gave his life for them. He is a martyr and saint.

Yes. Liu Xiaobo is a martyr and saint who possesses a moral authority that his persecutors can only envy. His legacy of love, justice, peace and sacrifice will surely far outlive the deeds of those who persecuted him.

That is exactly why the leaders of China are so afraid of him, so afraid of his words and deeds, and so afraid of his legacy. They are afraid of the inevitable comparison between Liu Xiaobo’s Chinese dream and Xi Jinping’s; they are afraid of the unavoidable likening of the Chinese Communist regime to the Nazis regime because Liu Xiaobo has been the first Nobel Peace Prize winner who died under confinement since Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist and an opponent of the Nazis, who died in 1938.

The CCP regime took pains to show the world it was strong and not afraid of Liu Xiaobo, yet its actions suggested otherwise. The CCP regime took pains to show the world that China is rising as a great civilized nation, yet its actions suggested otherwise. No nation that routinely persecutes, tortures and murders its best people can ever be described as strong, as great; no nation that does not allow a man such as Liu Xiaobo to die as a freeman is going to rise as a respected world power. Never.

In death, Liu Xiaobo has overcome the limits of time and space. The leaders of China wanted to bury him, trying make him disappear all together. But these cowards failed to understand that Liu Xiaobo is a seed. Where you bury him, there he grows. He is everywhere and forever.

Source: Initiatives for China

 

UN Watch Coalition Urges EU & US to Oppose Regimes in Next Week's UN Human Rights Council Election

Trying to save the United Nations from itself 

UN Watch and Human Rights Foundation brought famous dissidents to testify before a UN luncheon briefing yesterday. Left to right: Chinese dissident Yang Jianli, Cuban dissident Rosa Maria Paya, Saudi dissident Ali Al-Ahmed, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer, Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, HRF president Thor Halvorssen, and Russian dissident Masha Gessen.

GENEVA, November 5, 2013 - As the U.N. prepares to elect 14 nations next week to its highest human rights body, a coalition of non-governmental human rights groups and MPs sent an appeal yesterday to U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power and EU foreign affairs commissioner Catherine Ashton urging them to oppose the candidacies of China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, and Vietnam. The regimes were found to be "Not Qualified" under the U.N.'s own membership criteria, in a report presented yesterday at a UN briefing in New York before media, diplomats and human rights activists.

The qualifications of Maldives, Morocco, Namibia, South Africa, South Sudan, Uruguay were deemed "questionable" based on problematic human right records or UN voting records. Click here for PDF of the full report. The evaluations were published by two non-governmental organizations, the Geneva-based UN Watch and Human Rights Foundation.

"China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia systematically violate the human rights of their own citizens," said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer, "and they consistently vote the wrong way on UN initiatives to protect the human rights of others."

"For the UN to elect Saudi Arabia as a world judge on human rights would be like a town fire department choosing a pyromaniac to be its chief firefighter."

With the release of the report, an international coalition of NGOs and MPs appealed to the U.S. and the EU to take action.

Regrettably, so far neither the U.S. nor the EU have said a word about hypocritical candidacies that will undermine the credibility and effectiveness of the UN human rights system. By turning a blind eye as human rights violators easily join and subvert the council, leading democracies will be complicit in the world body's moral decline.

It will be an insult to their political prisoners and many other victims -- and a defeat for the global cause of human rights -- if the UN helps gross abusers act as champions and global judges of human rights. When the U.N.'s highest human rights body becomes a case of the foxes guarding the hen house, the world's victims suffer.

Yesterday's press briefing by UN Watch and Human Rights Foundation featured courageous champions of human rights pleading against the election of their oppressors:

• Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese civil rights activist who famously escaped house arrest in 2012 after being detained for organizing a lawsuit against Chinese authorities;
• Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi scholar and political analyst who was arrested as a teenager because of his family members’ political activity;
• Masha Gessen, a Russian journalist, author, and LGBT rights activist forced to flee her country with her family after a crackdown on same-sex families;
• Rosa Maria Payá, a human rights advocate from Cuba leading a campaign to launch an investigation into the death of her father, the late democracy leader Oswaldo Payá; and
• Yang Jianli, a Chinese scholar, pro-democracy advocate, and former political prisoner, who presented a petition against China’s bid for a seat on the UNHRC.

Human Rights Foundation president Thor Halvorssen and UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer jointly presented their report evaluating the countries that have submitted candidacies for the November 12 election of new members to the UNHRC. Click here for PDF of the full report.

Original link

China, Cuba and the Solidarity of the Shaken: Yris, Chen, and Yang meet at Forum 2000

"My dream is for China to have its own Velvet Revolution."- Yang Jianli, Forum 2000
in Ostrava, September 18, 2013

"We need to promote democracy. It isn't only on the shoulders of Chinese people, it's on the shoulders of the whole world." -Chen Guangcheng, Forum 2000 in Prague, September 17, 2013 

"It was a wonderful meeting, I learned a lot and I was able to explain my struggle. When I return to the island will tell my sisters in the movement of all these experiences that fills one with optimism for our struggle " - Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera , Forum 2000 in Prague, September 16, 2013

Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, Chen Guangcheng, and Yang Jianli

Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera met with and exchanged experiences with two well known Chinese pro-democracy activists: Chen Guangcheng and Yang Jianli.

It was a remarkable encounter that took place at Forum 2000 and an example of the solidarity of the shaken a coin termed by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka.

Erazim V. Kohák in his book Jan Patočka: philosophy and selected writings refers to Patočka’s “solidarity of the shaken” as a community freed “from the preoccupation with the pursuits of peace and prosperity that inevitably lead to war and turn it instead to the pursuit of the Good, the care of the soul” that is “living with a clear conscience, living in truth, or in far older terms, seeking first the Kingdom of God.”


Consider for a moment the backgrounds of these three human rights defenders.

Yang Jianli witnessed the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and later escaped to the United States. In 2002, he returned to China to help the labor movement with non-violent struggle strategies, was captured, arrested and sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for “spying”. He served out his full sentence and was released in 2007. He is also a signatory of Charter 08 – a manifesto of Chinese intellectuals calling for political reform in China.  In 2010 he picked up the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Liu Xiaobo. ( Fair notice: I was one of the signers of a petition calling on the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to attend the award ceremony in Oslo and am also an advocate for human rights in China).

Chinese Lawyer and Civil Rights Activist Chen Guangcheng has worked intensively on human rights issues in rural areas of the People’s Republic of China. He gained international recognition for organizing a landmark class-action lawsuit against authorities in Linyi, Shandong province, for the excessive enforcement of the one-child policy. As a result of this lawsuit, Mr. Chen was placed under house arrest from September 2005 to March 2006, and formally arrested in June 2006. During the trial, his attorneys were forbidden access to the court, leaving him without a proper defender. In April 2012, Mr. Chen escaped his house arrest and fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He is currently living in the U.S. He is a vocal advocate for women’s rights, land rights, and the welfare of the poor.

Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera is founder and President of the Rosa Parks Women’s Movement, whose objectives are to struggle against human rights violations in Cuba. Born in 1975 in Sancti Spiritus province in central Cuba, she entered the opposition movement in 1999, when her brother, Mario Pérez Aguilera, was unjustly imprisoned at Nieves Morejón prison. Thats where Yris met and later married Jorge Luis García Pérez, an activist who spent 17 years and 38 days in prison for calling in 1990 for human rights reforms in Cuba like those taking place in Eastern Europe at the time and refusing to be indoctrinated. Yris has organized protests, marches and social initiatives that have found housing for the homeless and improved, if not saved, lives in Cuba. She has stood up for those that can't defend themselves. She has paid a steep price for this suffering numerous detentions, brutal beatings that on more than one occasion led her to lose consciousness.

Worlds apart but joined together in their suffering for defending the dignity and rights of their fellow human beings because it is the right thing to do even if at the time it does not appear that it will accomplish a concrete external change, but it is the way these activists are able to hang on to their humanity confronting an immoral totalitarian regime that seeks to destroy human dignity and decency. Listening to them through translators one found that they understood each other speaking a an underlying language that transcended their languages of national origin.

The fact that they were brought together by Forum 2000 a project initiated by Vaclav Havel who's best known work outside of the Czech Republic is "The Power of the Powerless" and is dedicated "to the memory of Jan Patocka" should not be a surprise but the coherent, moral, and powerful legacy of a profoundly decent man who applied Patocka's ideas and put them into action.

Tiananmen Square Crackdown & June 4, 1989 Beijing Massacre: It was 22 years ago today

In memory of those who stood up for their rights, lost their lives and for those still unjustly imprisoned today in China.

Students peacefully demonstrating

Reuters reported yesterday that twenty two years after Tiananmen Square at least five individuals who took part in the demonstration remain imprisoned. There names are Jiang Yaqun, 75, Miao Deshun, 48, and Yang Pu, 47, Chang Jingqiang, 43, and Li Yujun, 48.

Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate, is currently imprisoned for his continued non-violent activism but had already served a prison sentence for his participation in the Tiananmen student protest.

Others participants like Yang Jianli are currently in exile but continue to speak out and demand justice. In an open letter that he will deliver later today to the UN Secretary General he states:

Twenty-two years ago today, Chinese Communist dictators, responding to student-led pro-democracy protests, called out tens of thousands of troops to “crush a counter-revolutionary riot." In a spasm of unimaginable violence, heavily armed soldiers and tanks attacked peaceful protesters. They shot at unarmed Chinese in and near Tiananmen Square, resulting in the death and maiming of thousands of their own citizens.

Young men and women vanished beneath tank tracks or lost their limbs. Others perished in a hail of gunfire from soldiers using assault rifles. Mothers lost their only sons and daughters. Children were orphaned, left to forever miss their parent’s love and warm embrace. Families were shattered. This was the single most tragic day in the history of modern China.

In 2011 Muammar Gaddafi believed that he could get away with mass murder because the world looked the other way in June of 1989 in Beijing and said it plainly: "The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square." Its not the first time impunity in one bloody deed has encouraged another. Between 1915 and 1917 the Ottoman Turks murdered more than 1.5 million Armenians and like the Chinese communists in 1989 got away with it. This inspired Adolph Hitler to carry out his own holocaust stating in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel has denounced indifference and silence before injustice stating that: "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."

It is in that spirit that this blog post is published today along with the time line below.



Abbreviated Time line of the June 4, 1989 massacre

30 May 1989 - The Goddess of Democracy is unveiled.

2 June 1989 - Liu Xiaobo and others start a hunger strike at 5 pm

- Communist party elders approve plan to put down the protests by force

The Goddess of Democracy

3 June 1989 - Troops are ordered to reclaim Tiananmen Square at all cost. They begin to open fire upon people blocking the advancement of the army and also on people who are just shouting at the troops. Tanks and armored vehicles move towards the center of the city.

Victims of the massacre

4 June 1989 - 1 am, troops surround Tiananmen Square and wait for orders

4 am, Liu Xiaobo and the other three men who began the second hunger strike negotiate with the troops to allow the students to leave the Square.

5 am, thousands of students, teachers and supporters leave the Square at gunpoint.
During this period of time, troops shoot two waves of fire.

5 June 1989 - Final act of defiance. An unarmed men blocks a column of tanks as they rolled towards Tiananmen Square. He's taken away by men in plainclothes. 22 years later his identity remains unknown.

Tankman