Chinese Human Rights Reader Entry Summary

The United Nations World Conference on Human Rights was held in June 1993 in Vienna. Prior to this conference, regional preparatory conferences were held in Tunis, San José, and Bangkok, with the goals of analyzing past achievements and failures in the international human rights regime, and making recommendations for improved mechanisms of implementation. The Bangkok conference became a forum for newly confident Asian regimes to attempt to put their own stamp on an international human rights process that they viewed as dominated by Western interests and conceptions of rights. The resulting Bangkok Declaration is a complex—some would say contradictory—document that endorses the universality of human rights but qualifies this at the same time, most famously in its Article 8: “[The signatories] recognize that while human rights are universal in nature, they must be considered in the context of a dynamic and evolving process of international norm-setting, bearing in mind the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds.” Many of the signatories to the Declaration became involved in promoting what came to be called “Asian values,” an idea that is harshly criticized by Liu Junning in our Text 58, below. The present selection is the speech made at the subsequent Vienna conference itself by China’s representative Liu Huaqiu. While endorsing international human rights work, Liu echoes the sentiments prominent in the Bangkok Declaration, and reiterates China’s official position that no country can use human rights concerns as a pretext to interfere with other countries’ internal affairs. He also puts forward the view that an individual must not “place his own rights and interests above those of the state and society” and stresses the centrality of the right to economic development.

The Chinese Human Rights Reader:

56. Vienna Conference Statement (1993)

Liu Huaqiu