Among the sanctions decided on in the wake of the Tiananmen events, the
then twelve members of the EEC, in line with other Western countries, agreed
to raise the issue of human rights violations in China at the annual meetings of
the Third Sub-Committee of the UN General Assembly and of the UNCHR.
Except for the 1991 UNCHR meeting – where a resolution against China was
not tabled by Western countries in order to garner its support for the war against
Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait – in the ensuing years the twelve
maintained a common position on China at the UNCHR.
As Philip Baker notes, all the draft resolutions tabled against China were co-
sponsored by all the member states taking part in the workings of the UNCHR
from 1992 to 1996.31 Although the common position presented by the EU
member states did not lead to the passing of any resolution at the UNCHR due
to the no-action motions proposed mostly by developing countries, the firm
31
stance of the member states represented an important base on which they and
other UNCHR members built their criticism against China at the UNCHR
meetings from 1992 to 1996. This was also confirmed by the 1995 Commission
Communication, which pointed out that as far as the UNCHR was concerned
“the level of international support attracted for the resolution criticizing the
situation in China in February 1995 suggests that it is bearing fruit”.32
However, the approach of the 1995 Commission Communication was soon
to be changed and the strong united stance of the EU member states frayed in
the following two years, leading to the eventual disbandment of the common
position on China at UNCHR in 1997. The Chinese authorities, having escaped
by one vote the UNCHR resolution of 1995, mounted an even stronger
campaign against it and in particular towards the EU member states.33 They
pursued this objective and showed their dissatisfaction with the EU and its
member states by suspending in 1996 the ECDHR begun a year earlier, and in
addition, they continued, and ostensibly increased, their attempts to divide
member states with promises of economic rewards.
These tactics would probably not have brought about the expected results if it
were not for the changing conditions in the EU member states. The most
important was the election of President Jacques Chirac in France in 1995 and
his stated desire to pursue a closer partnership with China. Chirac’s strategy of
joining hands with China in the pursuit of a multipolar system and to increase
French commercial and investment ties with the PRC in an attempt to catch up
with Germany and the UK made him very attentive to the Chinese offers.
32
European Commission, A long term policy for China-European Relations, p. 6. 33
The Chinese irritation at the resolutions tabled within the UNCHR has been mentioned in several interviews with Chinese scholars. Interviews 23 and 26.
The example of France was not missed by its direct European competitor on
the Chinese market, Helmut Kohl’s Germany, which had begun to pursue a
more strategic approach towards China as early as 1994 with the publication of
the Asien Konzept. The limited commitment to the human rights cause in China,
already demonstrated in the early 1990s with Germany’s quick re-starting of
ministerial exchanges and development projects, compounded with the
possibility to reap the economic benefits of such a symbolic gesture, easily
convinced the German Chancellor to follow the French lead.
France and Germany were not alone in reconsidering their positions at the
UNCHR. The importance of penetrating the Chinese market shared by these
two countries also reflected the opinions of other EU member states’
governments, Italy and Spain in particular. In the early 1990s the majority of the
EU member states had begun to acknowledge that they were losing ground in
the competition to enter the Chinese market, and that they were being
outdistanced both by the US and China’s Asian partners. This, among other
factors, was also attributed to the European confrontational attitude on human
rights. In fact this situation did not reflect the human rights stance of the EU
member states but primarily the way they had lagged behind in entering the
Chinese market, mostly due to geographical and historical reasons as shown in
the previous section.
The changing perspective on the tabling of the resolution was obvious in the
irreconcilable division that appeared at the Council meeting of 1997. The
Netherlands, a country generally in favour of a strong stance for the promotion
of human rights, held the Presidency and proposed the tabling of a new
resolution against China at the following UNCHR meeting. However, the
states on the one side and the UK, Sweden and other Nordic countries on the
other, remained.34
This division was reflected in the UNCHR meeting of that year where the
resolution tabled by Denmark was not co-sponsored by all the EU member
states present, leading to an even clearer defeat of the resolution.35 Ominously
the Chinese government carried out the threat of sanctions against Denmark,
which it had issued before the UNCHR meeting, by suspending some economic
contracts.
The outcome of the UNCHR meeting sparked outrage among some European
officials, above all the MEPs, who adopted various resolutions condemning the
EU member states’ inability to reach a common position.36 International
advocacy groups also expressed strong criticism about the EU member states’
failure to achieve unanimity at the UNCHR and questioned both the EU’s
human rights policy and the effectiveness of the newly-constituted CFSP. In
September 1997 Human Rights Watch wrote an open letter to the members of
the EP where it stated that the EU should continue to put pressure on China,
demanding it should keep its promises regarding respect for human rights.37
However, 1997 proved, at least according to EU officials, a very rewarding
year for the softer approach maintained in Geneva. At the end of 1997 as
proposed by Beijing in February of that year the ECDHR resumed, in exchange
for a softer approach at the UNCHR. Looking for a simple justification, the EU
34
At one point the Dutch Presidency threatened EU Member States that it would not table any resolution against any country at the Geneva session of the UNCHR in order not to show double-standards towards large, influential countries vs. poor and peripheral ones. Eventually, though, the threat did not materialise. Interview 20.
35
During the April 1997 Meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission France decided not to table the resolution drafted by the Netherlands on behalf of the EU and presented by Denmark. On the European Union side the resolution was supported by Sweden, Ireland, and the Netherlands, whereas Germany, Spain and Italy followed the example of France insisting on engaging China through a positive approach.
36
Interview 7. 37
officials noted that the results of the first ECDHR were very positive as they
had led to China’s agreement on (i) EC-funded cooperation programmes on
human rights, (ii) establishment of a bilateral team of experts to deal with issues
related to the signature and ratification of the two main International Covenants
on human rights, (iii) a visit of the Troika to Tibet and (iv) an early visit of the
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to China.38 Confident of such results
the EU officials and member states in favour of the policy shift felt reassured
that they could proceed in the direction they had set for themselves.39
If the disbandment at the UNCHR meeting of 1997 was striking, even more
so was the Council’s decision in 1998. Ironically, the Council listened to the
requests of the EP to harmonise member states’ attitudes and speak with a single
voice on human rights violations in China. Despite criticism, under the
Presidency of the UK, the Council institutionalised in 1998, the 1997 practice
and concluded that neither the Presidency nor member states “should table or
co-sponsor a draft resolution at the UNCHR”.40 So much for proponents of a
single voice. As Andrew Clapham laconically commented “it is disturbing that
the first time the Council formalized its position with regard to an impending
country resolution at the UN, it was to announce that the Union would not be
acting, and nor would its member states”.41
In order to justify the new policy, the Council and its member states referred
to the concept of effectiveness, which had initially been put forward by those
member states in favour of abandoning the resolution. Although framing it in
38
Leon Brittan quoted in Elena Fierro, The EU’s approach to human rights, p. 204. 39
Despite all the allegedly positive results obtained by the EU-China Dialogue on Human Rights, the year 1998 proved one of the bloodiest in China due to a harsh crackdown over political dissidents and Falun Gong members as reported in Amnesty International, Human Rights in the World Report 1998, London, Amnesty Publishing House, 1999.
40
General Affairs and External Relations Council, Council Conclusions, 23 February 1998. 41
Andrew Clapham, ‘Where is the EU’s Human Rights Common Foreign Policy, and How is it Manifested in Multilateral Fora?, in Philip Alston (ed.), The EU and Human Rights, p. 647.
human rights terms, they argued that human rights promotion through the
UNCHR was not working. This was indirectly confirmed in the 1998
Commission Communication, which dropped reference to a multilateral
approach for the promotion of human rights in China.42 The EU and its member
states agreed that economic engagement, dialogues and development assistance
would be the most effective means to promote human rights in the country.
All in all, in the case of the UNCHR the combination of economic motives
and the divisions among member states led to the abandonment of the
sanctioning policy embraced after the Tiananmen Massacre. Yet the appeasing
approach of the EU institutions and the member states that was decided in 1998
shows that despite differences the member states eventually found a very low
compromise according to which sanctions towards China would be abandoned
and concrete policies adopted to promote human rights in the country. Such a
compromise greatly derived from the influence exerted by the main partners of
China in the EU, namely France and Germany, and to a lesser extent the UK.
Considering the previous approaches of the EU’s Nordic countries this also
suggests that the latter countries might have been negatively socialised into
abandoning the UNCHR resolution.