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UK SECTION |
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China: Cameron should follow Thatcher
on rights, says MEP |
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9 November 2010 Britain's
premier David Cameron should follow Margaret Thatcher's approach to the
Soviet Union and take a tough line on his visit to Beijing, a leading critic
of the regime's human rights record said at the former Conservative HQ, now
the EU's London office. Mr
Edward McMillan-Scott, the European Parliament's Vice-President for human
rights and democracy, has written to Cameron listing six of his Beijing
contacts who have been imprisoned and in some cases tortured. He said:
Speaking
to a lunchtime meeting of the Association of European Journalists at Europe
House, Smith Square, London SW1, the MEP told David Cameron: Your approach to China should
be 'not just business as usual, but also politics as usual'. Margaret
Thatcher took a tough and principled line with the Soviet Union because it
was a repressive regime. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain for
a more peaceful future by telling the world the truth about China. Margaret
Thatcher did not flinch – nor should you. On human rights, I believe
you can lead in Europe. Margaret
Thatcher was nicknamed the "Iron Lady" by the Soviets, but on a
later visit to Moscow in September 1989 she invoked the memory of the recent
Tiananmen Square massacre to praise President Gorbachev's reforms. The EU is
currently reviewing its human rights policies and is expected to take a tough
line on trade talks with China. McMillan-Scott
described China as a "terror state" on the BBC World Service's
breakfast show on 9 November, arguing that the systematic use of the
death penalty, imprisonment without charge and the widespread use of torture
in its forced labour camps kept a population of 1.3 billion in thrall. The
complete absence of political or religious freedom could not disguise the
regime's wholesale corruption from an increasingly networked population. One of
McMillan-Scott's contacts, Mr Cao Dong, told the MEP in Beijing in May 2006
that he had seen his best friend's body in the prison hospital with holes where
body parts had been removed. Cao Dong is back in prison in northern
China and has been on hunger strike in protest at being tortured. "It
is a disgusting fact that China has specially made hospital vans which travel
to executions, now by injection rather than shooting because that preserves
the bodies for state-run organ harvesting." McMillan-Scott
met the "Sunflower Seeds" sculptor Ai Weiwei at his Tate Modern
preview last month and says that the artist speaks for millions. A
co-designer of the Birds Nest, Ai Weiwei refused to attend the Olympics in
protest at the Beijing regime's brutal tactics: "Ai
Weiwei is an extraordinarily courageous man to speak as honestly and clearly
about the regime, which he described as 'disgusting' on the eve of the 2008
Olympics. I fear for his safety." Letter from Edward
McMillan-Scott to David Cameron The AEJ meeting on 9 November
2010 |
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