Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move:

"That Seanad Éireann: acknowledges that:

- Ireland has a proud history of supporting the protection of human rights across the world, particularly in developing countries;

- the free profession and practice of religion is a cornerstone of Irish society and is enshrined in our Constitution;

- Ireland has maintained good diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China since 1979;

- in 2019, Ireland imported some €5 billion worth of goods from China, and exported €8 billion to China;

- Ireland was elected to the United Nations Security Council in June 2020;

notes with concern the continuing reports of egregious human rights violations perpetrated by authorities of the People’s Republic of China against members of the Uyghur Muslim population and against other minority groups in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which include:

- the mass arrest and internment of at least one million people on arbitrary grounds without due process;

- physical and psychological abuse of those detained, including torture and forced labour;

- the forced separation of children from their families;

- forced re-education of children to compel them to abandon their language and culture;

- sustained surveillance and intimidation against the wider population;

- coercion of women to undergo abortions, sterilisations, and the insertion of intrauterine devices under threat of arrest and internment, as a means of controlling the population of the minority groups;

- sustained attacks upon the culture, language and religion of minority groups;

and calls on the Government to:

- condemn these practices unreservedly;

- call on the People’s Republic of China to bring to an immediate end to these practices and to allow United Nations human rights monitors to access detention centres in the region; and

- use all available trade and diplomatic channels, including the United Nations Security Council, to insist on the observance of basic human rights protections for the Uyghur Muslim population and for all citizens of the People’s Republic of China."

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Colm Brophy, to the House. The persecution of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China has horrified the world. Many of the facts exposed in recent years by the leak of the so-called “China Cables” are already on the record of the House and the Dáil but some of the details are worth repeating.

Religious persecution began in Xinjiang in 2014 with petty laws banning the wearing of beards and headscarves and preventing parents from giving their children Muslim names, such as Mohammed. This quickly escalated into the destruction of mosques and Muslim cemeteries. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute recently produced a study of satellite imagery that shows thousands of mosques – some 30% of the total in the region - have been destroyed since 2017.

The construction of detention camps began in 2014 and was denied by China until 2018. China refers to the camps as vocational education and training centres. They are anything but. One million people are in these camps, which is 10% of the entire Uyghur population of Xinjiang. It is the greatest mass detention of human beings since the Holocaust. Detainees are forced to abandon their language and religion, and are routinely tortured. Children are separated from their parents. Outside the camps, citizens are subjected to widespread surveillance. Women are forced to undergo abortions, sterilisations, and other procedures. The aim of these policies is to reduce the Uyghur population and in that China has succeeded. The birth rate in Xinjiang dropped by one third in 2018 alone. China says that its activities in Xinjiang are a measured response to terrorist activity by Uyghur militants. The reality is that China is attempting to commit cultural genocide and to erase the Uyghur people and its culture from the region.

I acknowledge that the Government and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Coveney, have said much more than most countries about this problem. In July 2019, Ireland was among 22 signatories of a joint letter to the UN Human Rights Council, which condemned these practices in strong terms. China responded to the joint letter by leveraging its economic influence over 50 countries to get them to issue statements supporting its actions in Xinjiang. We see here a consistent pattern whereby China exerts its economic influence, appeals to authoritarian governments and stresses issues such as sovereignty to get countries to back up its denials of what it is doing and reject the expression of concern internationally.

We have all become familiar with the term “cancel culture” in recent years, where public figures or companies are brought to heel, usually on social media, for saying or doing something objectionable. The Chinese do cancel culture better than anybody else. It has been at the core of their diplomatic strategy for decades, to bend countries to their will on issues like Tibet or their treatment of Christians. I noted recently that Mercedes-Benz had linked at one point to a reference to the Dalai Lama on Instagram. This occurred in the United States. The company ended up apologising for this because of the pressure that was brought. This is happening all over the world. Companies are succumbing to Chinese bullying and to mass outrage expressed on Weibo and other platforms.

China's most successful efforts have been in relation to Taiwan, or “Taiwan, China” as China insists we refer to that place. China has successfully bullied the international community into marginalising Taiwan for decades. Despite being one of the most successful countries in fighting Covid-19, Taiwan is not a member of the World Health Organization for the sole reason that China has an informal veto in place, which the international community refuses to challenge. This is part of the reason the motion stresses that Ireland must use its trade as well as diplomatic channels in roundly condemning Chinese abuses in Xinjiang. The experience of Taiwan is instructive. I have great admiration for our Ceann Comhairle but about two years ago, he wrote to Deputies stressing that the "One China" policy was in place. Ireland has adhered to the One China policy since 1971. The Ceann Comhairle stressed that politicians who were visiting Taiwan should bear in mind Ireland's strengthening economic and cultural links with China. I do not know of any other country in the world that would put this kind of pressure on a Government, in this case the Irish Government and the Ceann Comhairle, to communicate a message like that to Deputies. This approach and the same tactics are now being used by China to silence the international community in relation to Uyghur Muslims and the other minorities in that area, and this campaign is likely to escalate.

Ireland has enjoyed reasonably good relations with China since 1979 and there has been steady growth in the value of our trade. In 2019, we imported some €5 billion worth of goods from China and exported €8 billion in goods to China. In proposing this motion, I anticipated concern or resistance from the Government to the idea of connecting our human rights policies with trade, as the motion does. I am glad the Government is not opposing the motion today, although I know it has particular concerns. The point is that there cannot be a Chinese wall between our trade agenda for China and our human rights agenda internationally. We cannot sacrifice human rights on the altar of trade with China or any other country.

Can our views on the protection of human rights and human life be qualified or be subject to caveat based on selfish economic interests?They simply cannot. We must find other ways of dealing with the world.

Trade is a competence of the European Union, and it is correct that we have no power to place tariffs on Chinese imports, impose any kind of sanctions or do anything of that nature. The Government and its agencies retain the power, however, to influence EU policy in these matters and the power to decide to whom we market our goods and services, and we spend a great deal of money doing so. There have been several trade missions in recent years led by Ministers, including Deputy Humphreys, the former Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, and Deputy Creed, the former Minister for Agriculture, Food and Marine. The Government cannot push all of the responsibility onto Brussels. This is what we do.

We must ask, therefore, should we be satisfied with a situation where our Ministers and our State agencies wine and dine Chinese officials, paid for by taxpayers' money, while the Chinese regime engages in these unimaginable practices against Uyghur Muslims and other minorities. I would like the Minister of State to address that point. Should we not instead find alternative sources of imports and alternative markets for our exports? We should, of course. This House has spent an inordinate amount of time debating imports from Israeli settlements, which total no more than €1.5 million per annum. We import 3,000 times as much from China, yet very little has ever been said about that.

We cannot pretend either that China's behaviour is not going to continue to get worse, so it simply has to be met head on. The Chinese Communist Party has made it clear that it worships at the altar of two false idols: international prestige and legitimacy on the one hand, and money on the other. With that in mind, should the international community begin to speak to China in language it understands? Should the European Union, together with the United States, begin working to lead an international effort to disengage from China for as long as human rights abuses on this scale continue? Should Ireland be leading the charge for those calls within the EU?

The EU currently has trade sanctions in place against various countries, including North Korea, Syria and Myanmar. These are all low-hanging fruit, easy targets, because the EU hardly exports to them, and they pose no threat to us. Are we to believe that the treatment of civilians in North Korea and Syria or the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar is more abhorrent than the treatment of Uyghur Muslims and therefore more deserving of sanctions? Nobody could say such a thing with a straight face, and yet China remains untouched by the EU so far.

China’s stock response to this issue has been to deny, deny and to deny. Most of us in the House will have seen footage of the detention camps, of people being led away, blindfolded, from those camps, and the Chinese ambassador coming on television simply to deny what people's own eyes are telling them is true. Xi Jinping, the President of China, gave a pious lecture to the UN General Assembly on 22 September last, saying that:

... countries should not breach the moral standard and should comply with international norms. Major countries should act like major countries.

What hypocrisy and what cant that was.

The treatment of the Uyghur people tells us much about the mentality of the Chinese Communist Party. In a country of 1.4 billion people, life is cheap and human rights mean little or nothing. Edmund Burke said that the use of the penal laws to persecute Catholics in Ireland was "the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself". These sentiments apply exactly to the motivations of China and to the actions of that country. The aim is to dehumanise the Uyghurs and other minority groups, to rob them of their dignity and to extinguish their culture. Those, after all, are the end goals of communism and extreme left-wing politics in all its forms – to extinguish the human spirit, to demand conformity in all things and to suborn the personal, individual spirit to the overriding demands of the state and the identity of the state. This House and the Government need to send the strongest possible message that all of this is reprehensible, and we need to use every possible means at our disposal to try to bring all this to an end.

I was at a conference last year that was addressed by Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong and by Mr. Martin Lee, the father of democracy in Hong Kong, who has recently been arrested for his role in protests against what China has been doing in Hong Kong. Even at that relatively low-level, low-key conference-----