More than a hundred experts and scholars on China as well as human rights activists have issued an open letter calling on the European Union to stop its investment agreements with China.
According to Spiegel, quoted by Deutsche Welle on Monday, the publication obtained in advance an open letter from more than a hundred experts to the EU institutions. The letter reads, “Despite ethnic cleansing, forced labor and other gross violations of human rights, the leadership of the EU institutions decided to sign an agreement that does not hold the Chinese government meaningfully responsible for ensuring that Crimes Against Humanity and slave labor are brought to an end.”
Der Spiegel quoted the letter as saying that the EU-China investment agreement is “based on a naive understanding of the nature of the Chinese Communist Party” and furthermore “exacerbates the EU’s already existing strategic dependence on China and runs counter to the EU’s fundamental values.”
The letter also cites examples of Beijing‘s broken promises and human rights violations in recent years, including the crackdown on the Hong Kong democracy movement, forced labor camps for Uighurs, and Beijing’s new sanctions against Australia and crackdown on Taiwan.
Signatories to the letter include academics from the London School of Economics and Princeton University, as well as Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uighur Congress, who lives in Germany; Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata, former Italian foreign minister; and Professor Harriet Evans, an expert on gender rights and human rights in China at the University of Westminster, according to the report.
Recent Comments