WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters Life!) - Promises China made to improve its human rights record in order to host the 2008 Olympics are not being kept, experts and lawmakers told a U.S. government panel on Wednesday.
Five months before the opening ceremony, conditions may be getting worse with the detention of Chinese activists who have sought to link human rights to the Beijing Olympics, witnesses told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
"We have continued to document not only chronic human rights abuses inside China -- such as restrictions on speech, assembly and political participation -- but also abuses that are taking place specifically as a result of China's hosting the 2008 Summer Games," Sophie Richardson of the New York-based Human Rights Watch told the panel in Washington.
Richardson and other media freedom and rights watchdogs raised the cases of activist Hu Jia, who was detained for inciting subversion after supporting campaigns for democratic reform, and Yang Chunlin, a factory worker on trial after calling for rights to take precedence over the Olympics.
China, which lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympics in a campaign overshadowed by the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of democracy protesters, had secured this year's games in part by promising to improve rights.
"It is clear the Chinese government has no intention of following through on these commitments," said Richardson. She warned that failure to press Beijing would give the crackdown a stamp of world approval and make it harder to reverse after the Olympics.
Bob Dietz, Committee to Protect Journalists Asia Program Coordinator, told the commission that China has been the leading jailer of journalists since 1999, with at least 25 reporters behind bars on vague charges such as revealing state secrets or inciting subversion of state power.
"Media conditions in China do not reflect the sort of change we were assured we would see after Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games," Dietz said.
At a hearing focused on China's domestic situation, Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Joseph Pitts, a commission member, also faulted Beijing's close diplomatic, economic and military relations with repressive regimes in Myanmar and Sudan.
"If the Chinese government wants to curtail criticism of its actions, then it needs to implement long-term, lasting changes that improve the lives and protect the freedoms of the Chinese people and other peoples around the world," he said.
China told the United States on Tuesday it is willing to resume a bilateral human rights dialogue that Beijing broke off in 2004 after Washington urged a U.N. watchdog to condemn Chinese practices.
Human rights experts at Wednesday's panel were sceptical about that gesture, which China Labor Bulletin director Robin Monroe called a "smokescreen to deflect international attention away from continued Games-related crackdowns."
Richardson said the "decreasing volume of American criticism" of China's rights record in the past decade was partly to blame for China's backsliding.
She urged U.S. President George W. Bush to reconsider plans to attend the Beijing Olympics if the crackdown persists. (Editing by Todd Eastham)
