[마감 후] The weight of human rights / Lee Jae-yeon, deputy director of the political department

▲ Lee Jae-yeon, deputy director of the political department

In the banquet hall of the G20 summit held in Bali, Indonesia last week, a short but rare show was created.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has openly expressed his dissatisfaction with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over reports of a brief meeting between the two countries the previous day. The minute-long conversation was captured intact on the broadcast pool camera. “Every conversation we had was leaked to the media,” Xi said. This kind of method is not appropriate,” he said. President Xi raised both hands in a blocking gesture and said, “Let’s create the conditions,” and then left.

In response to the other country’s leader’s unprecedented public rebuke attitude, there was an immediate response that he was “rude” and in Canada the public protested that “we were considered a small country.”

A day earlier, the Canadian government informed the media that “Prime Minister Trudeau has expressed grave concern about China’s increasingly aggressive meddling activities” and President Xi has disputed this. Canada’s “intervention” refers to allegations that China intervened in the 2019 Canadian election by funding pro-Chinese candidates. As China has protested Western concerns over allegations of human rights violations such as forced labor and sexual assault in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as “interference in internal affairs,” it is bound to be sensitive to suspicions of electoral interference in other countries.

For China, there must be an unfair side. Meanwhile, whenever the West has raised the issue of human rights abuses in Hong Kong, a minority in China, China has protested that it “politicises human rights issues and interferes in other countries’ internal affairs.” However, this behavior is not much different whether it is in western countries or communist countries. The problem is that, meanwhile, human rights themselves are often left behind.

The relationship between Canada and China, which has been uncomfortable in recent years, has been a human rights issue on the surface, but behind the scenes there is a competition for supremacy. In December 2018, Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer (CFO) of Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei, on charges of violating the Iran Sanctions Act at the request of the United States, and only released him in September of last year. In other words, the United States, which felt a threat to national security from the advance of Chinese information technology (IT) companies in the West, worked. At the time, China protested, “The fact that Meng Wanzhou was detained for nearly 1,000 days even though he did not violate Canadian law is a clear arbitrary detention and a violation of human rights.” Earlier this year, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin sarcastically called the United States a “master of detention.”

On human rights in North Korea, the international community has generally been unanimous, but in South Korea, each government has a different opinion. The North Korean human rights resolution, which contains concerns about the human rights situation in North Korea and calls for improvements, is due for approval at the United Nations General Assembly next month for the 18th consecutive year. This year’s resolution also includes references to the “forced repatriation of North Korean fishermen to North Korea and the assassination of public officials in the West Sea”. South Korea’s decision to re-participate in the resolution after the Moon Jae-in administration and the decision to participate in the resolution for four years is also believed to be a matter of political dispute. As the saying goes, ‘the weight of human rights equals the weight of the earth’, I mean there are no light human rights.

Lee Jae-yeon, deputy director of the political department