China and Human Rights: ‘Then They Came For Me, And There Was No One Left To Speak For Me’

A protest against the Chinese government in 2008 in San Francisco. Creative Commons image.

(OPINION) “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

With these words Martin Niemoller criticized our silence in the eyes of evil, silence that amounts to complicity in the crimes. These words are as relevant now as they were during War World II. These words are also relevant in the case of human rights violations in China. 

For years, human rights defenders and international journalists have sound the alarm on human rights violations in China. They raised the alarm on the practice of live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. However, as there were no bodies, no-one listened. They raised the alarm on so-called “re-education camps” and forced labor of the Uighur Muslims.

However, as the evidence was not bulletproof, we disregarded it. Now they raise the alarm at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, bringing news of medical professionals who disappeared shortly after speaking out. However, we continue to give China the benefit of the doubt. Now, the Chinese Government has banned several journalists from China. 

At least 13 U.S. journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were to be expelled from China in a crackdown on foreign media. China justified the unprecedented move as a retaliatory move in response to tighter U.S. regulation of Chinese media out of concern that they were being used to spin propaganda. Both moves escalate the COVID-19 blame game between China and the US (with China suggesting that the virus originated in the US rather than in the Chinese city of Wuhan). 

Independent of the U.S.-China COVID-19 war, it is crucial to emphasize that the removal of journalists from China is not insignificant. In recent years, we have witnessed how China has been manipulating its news outlets, providing narratives that bear no relation to the truth. For example, the mass incarceration of close to a million of Uighur Muslims, designed to strip them of their religious identity, became a “re-education camp.” In the recent months, we have witnessed how suppression of key information has led to the spread of COVID-19 worldwide with little or any suppression, putting the lives of millions of people at risk, killing more than 240,000 people worldwide (as of May 2, 2020) and wreaking havoc on the economy. As the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, stressed: “As the pandemic spreads, it has also given rise to a second pandemic of misinformation, from harmful health advice to wild conspiracy theories. The press provides the antidote: verified, scientific, fact-based news and analysis.”

We must “celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom; assess the state of press freedom throughout the world; defend the media from attacks on their independence, and pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty” and recognize the important contribution of journalists reporting on human rights violations and events that affect us all, one way or another.

We need independent and responsible journalism, now more than ever. Now, more than ever, we can see how suppression of information can effect everyone around the world. Now, more than ever, we can see that without access to such independent and responsible journalism, we are left helpless without any possibility to defend ourselves.

Ewelina U. Ochab is a legal researcher and human rights advocate, PhD candidate and author of the book “Never Again: Legal Responses to a Broken Promise in the Middle East” and more than 30 UN reports. She works on the topic of persecution of minorities around the world. This piece was re-published from Forbes with permission.