Tell China to stop slave labour

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Chiang Ying-ying / The Associated Press Archives Hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners hold a candlelight vigil in Taiwan in 2009 to mark 10th anniversary of China�s crackdown on the group. (CP)

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on his trade mission to China next week, should ask China to stop exporting the products of slave labour to Canada and to shut down its extensive network of slave labour camps. He should propose an arrangement with China to attempt to ensure that this happens.

China engages systematically in forced labour in all forms of detention facilities -- prisons that house sentenced criminals, administrative detention for those not yet charged, and "re-education through labour" camps.

A 1998 declaration of the International Labour Organization commits all member states, including China, to eliminate forced labour. The government of China reported to the ILO that its constitution prohibits forced labour and that there is a national policy of eliminating all forms of forced labour.

Yet, forced labour in detention is not an abuse of Chinese law. It is the law. Article 58 of the Chinese Law on Prisons stipulates that prisons may punish a prisoner who is able bodied but refuses to work.

The United States signed a memorandum of understanding with China in 1992 committing the government of China to ensure prison labour products are not exported to the United States.

The U.S. in 1994 signed a statement of co-operation which, in principle, allowed U.S. officials to gain access to Chinese production facilities suspected of exporting prison labour products.

The U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, in its report to Congress for 2008, wrote "the Chinese government has not complied with its commitments" under the 1992 and 1994 agreement "making it impossible for U.S. officials to conduct complete and useful investigations of such allegations."

While compliance with these agreements set a poor precedent, the existence of these agreements is positive. Canada should enter into similar agreements with China and then attempt to enforce them.

If several countries had such agreements with China, their combined pressure is more likely to lead to compliance than the pressure of one country alone, even if that one country is the United States.

Speaking to U.S. journalists in November 1993, in answer to a question about the desire by rights groups to inspect prisons, then-Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen said, "I believe that if the Red Cross does put forward such a request... we would give positive consideration to that request."

The Red Cross did put forward such a request, and there was no positive consideration.

Though 1993 is almost 20 years ago, the promise should not be forgotten. Harper should ask the Chinese president to respect that request and allow unrestricted International Committee of the Red Cross access to Chinese places of detention.

Under the United Nations Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review, when China's turn came up February 2009 in Geneva, the government of Canada, to its credit, along with the United Kingdom, Hungary, the Czech Republic, France, Sweden and New Zealand, recommended China abolish all forms of arbitrary detention, including "re-education through labour" camps. The government of China said no to this recommendation.

That recommendation, once made, should not be forgotten simply because China has rejected it. The position Canada asserted in 2009 in Geneva should be maintain in 2012 in Beijing.

Most of the people in Chinese slave labour camps are practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritually based set of exercises which the Communist Party banned in 1999 out of fear the ideological supremacy of the party was threatened by its popularity.

The U.S. State Department's 2005 country report on China indicated its police run hundreds of detention centres, with the 340 "re-education-through-labour" camps alone having a holding capacity of about 300,000 persons.

The department's reports from 2006 to 2009 and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2011 stated that according to foreign observer estimates: "Falun Gong adherents constituted at least half of the 250,000 officially recorded inmates in the country's re-education through labour camps."

The officially recorded inmates are not the full detention population. Unofficial estimates suggest there are 1,200 forced labour camps with two million inmates.

We concluded, in two reports in 2006 and 2007 and a book published in 2009 under the title Bloody Harvest, that Falun Gong practitioners have been killed in the tens of thousands for their organs sold for transplants. Chinese arbitrary detention facilities are not just forced labour camps. They are also vast forced organ-donor banks.

Imports should withstand scrutiny on both economic and ethical terms. A trade mission to a Communist state exporting the products of slave labour around the world at rock bottom prices should do more than getting good deals for Canada. The mission should do what it can to end the abhorrent practice of slave labour in China.

David Matas is a Winnipeg-based international human rights lawyer. David Kilgour, a former Liberal minister of state for Asia and the Pacific, collaborated in writing this piece.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 4, 2012 J1