U.N. human rights chief, Mary Robinson said on Tuesday China has made small steps on human rights, such as allowing family access to labor camp prisoners, but still has a long way to gAfter five years in office and seven visits to China, Robinson said "technical cooperation" between her office and Beijing had helped spawn minimal reforms to the widely criticized "laogai" or "re-education through labour" system.
It had also spurred human rights training for police and prison officers and discussions on introducing human rights education into primary and secondary schools, she said.
But rights remained a concern as outlawed groups such as the Falun Gong spiritual movement were repressed, the death penalty was used widely, Tibet's culture was diluted and Tibetans had became a minority in the region's main city, Lhasa, she said.
The outspoken Robinson acknowledged some progress on laogai reform, a cornerstone of her China campaign, but said the government needed to abolish the system to fulfil a U.N. covenant on civil and political rights it has promised to ratify.
"We continue to bring it home to the Chinese authorities that, at the moment, re-education through labor for what they call punishment of minor crimes would not satisfy the criteria," she told reporters in reference to the covenant.
MENTAL INSTITUTIONS
China says human rights have improved dramatically under Communist rule and accuses Western critics of imposing their values on a developing and largely impoverished country.
But Robinson said she told Chinese officials of her concerns that people were incarcerated in mental institutions for political reasons, as outlined in a report by the group Human Rights Watch earlier this month.
Robinson said she had also pressed vice foreign minister Wang Guangya to release prisoners, including Uighur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer, jailed for eight years for mailing newspaper clippings to her U.S.-based husband, and historian Tohti Tunyaz.
She said the list included four men accused of leading mass labor protests in the northeastern city of Liaoyang in March over official corruption, unpaid wages and benefits.
Robinson said she had brought up many of the cases on previous visits but to no apparent avail. Wang gave assurances the cases were being examined, she said.
"I have made it clear both to the Chinese authorities and more publicly that I'm concerned that there isn't as much progress in relation to individual cases," she said.
TAKING ROOT
However, the Communist rulers of fast-changing China were grappling to find a new value system as discontent over greed and corruption spread and they showed signs of moving toward their critics on human rights, she said.
"The international human rights standards and its application in China together with China drawing on good components of its own strengths would make a very good value system," she said.
"I think this is starting to be part of what I'm hearing from some of the Chinese interlocutors," she said.
"Even though there hasn't been as much progress as I would have liked, there has been progress in an acceptance that this (criticism) is part of the human rights agenda and will remain so."
Robinson said China had to implement political reform to deal with growing labor unrest as competition arising from recent accession to the World Trade Organization ( news - web sites) threw millions out of work.
"China should look at the need for more space to address issues of labor unrest and obviously the straightforward way of doing that is to open up to independent trade unions to allow workers to organize," she said.
"I see for human rights reasons that China needs political reform," she said without further elaboration.
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