On the Job! Human Rights in China

(On the Job! pays occasional notice to interesting intlaw job notices)

Human Rights in China is recruiting for a number of staff positions.

HRIC is a nongovernmental organization founded by Chinese students and scholars in March 1989, months before the Tiananmen demonstrations (about which IntLawGrrls have posted here). From offices in New York, Hong Kong, and Belgium, HRIC's "board and staff include Chinese, North American, and European individuals devoted to fostering greater space for democratic reforms and social justice," and to advancing the "mission to promote international human rights and advance the institutional protection of these rights in the People’s Republic of China."

The NGO is recruiting for the following positions, most of which require language skills in both Mandarin and English:

► Program Directors in New York and Hong Kong, and, in New York,

► Marketing and Operations Associate,

► Communications Officer, and

► Information Communications Technology/Web Developer.

Details here.

On December 19

On this day in ...
... 1984 (25 years ago today), in Beijing, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang signed the Joint Sino-British Declaration, which provided that Hong Kong would be returned to China in 1997, thus "end[ing] 155 years of British rule in the colony" and "launch[ing] a new era in trade and diplomacy between the two countries." The transfer did go forward as planned, although in wake of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre England "gran[ted] British passports to 50,000 Hong Kong heads of families, buil[t] a new international airport, and introduc[ed] a Bill of Rights."

(Prior December 19 posts are here and here.)

'Nuff said

(Occasional item taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes.)

When invited to speak at a London human rights event recently as a banned Chinese novelist, I was asked not to say anything negative about my country.

-- Ma Jian (right), in an op-ed translated by Flora Drew (left). The essay compares the permitted public commemorations of victims of the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake with the prohibition on commemorations of the victims of the June 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Secure or surveilled?

Trade and human rights are once again at odds as US firms seek to provide surveillance equipment to China for the Beijing Olympics. Following the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989, Congress banned the export of “crime control or detection instruments or equipment” to China. In providing surveillance equipment designed to keep athletes as well as spectators safe from terrorist attacks during the Olympics, US companies may be violating the spirit, if not the letter of the law. The Commerce Department doesn’t agree: equipment that serves only law enforcement purposes, such as devices that detect fingerprints at crime scenes, are banned, but video systems that have broader uses, such as alarms, movement control devices or counting systems, are allowed. Companies like Honeywell, IBM and United Technologies are supplying not just cameras, but systems capable of analyzing and cataloging people and behavior. Once the Olympics are over, these systems will almost certainly be converted to use in China’s recently embraced program to render more than 600 cities “safe” through video surveillance. Cameras may be trained not only on criminals, but dissidents. As Steve Vickers, a former Hong Kong criminal intelligence officer said,

I don’t know of an intelligence-gathering operation in the world that, when given a new toy, doesn’t use it.

On May 20, ...

... 1803, in what then was Lower Canada and now is Québec, Chief Justice William Osgoode ruled that "slavery was not compatible with British law," thus limiting slave trafficking in the province.
...1902 (105 years ago today), the Republic of Cuba was established, bringing an end to U.S. occupation that had persisted since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898.
... 1989, in the face of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square (right), Chinese leaders declared martial law. Protests would continue throughout the month.