China's deputy permanent representative to the UN, Sun Lei, exercised the right of reply at the General Assembly's Third Committee general debate on Oct. 5 (local time). Sun said representatives of Britain, Australia, Japan, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania had groundlessly accused and maliciously slandered China's human rights situation, and expressed strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition.

The Third Committee handles social, humanitarian and cultural issues, and each autumn its general debate sees member states trade positions on human rights. The right of reply lets a state that has been mentioned respond immediately, and the same scene repeats in this committee almost every year.

The arguments China put forward

Sun began with poverty. He said China had eliminated absolute poverty and lifted nearly 100 million people out of it, while noting that more than 14 million people in Britain live below the poverty line and that child poverty is increasingly prominent in Japan.

On democracy, he said approval and satisfaction ratings for the Chinese government have exceeded 90% for years, contrasting that with a British poll showing about 75% of people worried about democracy's prospects. On ethnic minorities, he said the political, economic, cultural and religious rights of China's peoples are effectively protected, and countered that Japan does not treat the Ainu and Ryukyuans as equal groups.

Sun urged a few countries to stop fabricating and spreading falsehoods about China and to stop politically manipulating the human rights issue.

A third view

Human rights debates easily turn into matching one side's examples against the other's. Countries use different yardsticks and statistics, and the same indicator is read differently. At the UN, such exchanges sometimes serve as a channel for dialogue and sometimes harden confrontation. Sinobridge Times does not judge for either side but separates who said what.