The Czech Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee adopted a resolution last week condemning the Chinese government’s manipulation of a key United Nations resolution on Taiwan. Similar initiatives in the parliaments of Australia, The Netherlands, the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom over the previous months called out Beijing’s longstanding campaign to block Taiwan’s democratic government from participating in U.N. activities. Governments willing to tackle this challenge also should confront Beijing’s strikingly similar threat to the U.N. human rights system.
At a time of global backsliding on democracy and human rights, these efforts may seem niche or Quixotic. But democracies defending one another, particularly through their own domestic institutions and not only as a matter of foreign policy, demonstrates a principled commitment. Few issues matter more to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping than retaking control of Taiwan, and his regime has lashed out at other governments taking milder positions on the issue. But these six democracies have recognized that Xi’s posture threatens them and the U.N., one of the key international institutions on which they rely, creating considerable diplomatic momentum for a position that was unimaginable at the beginning of 2024.
The parliamentary efforts are informed by groundbreaking report earlier this year by scholars Bonnie S. Glaser and Jacques deLisle for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, “Exposing the PRC’s Distortion of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to Press its Claims Over Taiwan.” It details Beijing’s decades-long efforts to launder its claims of sovereignty through the United Nations.
But the political pathologies detailed — and the recommendations offered — could equally apply to Beijing’s efforts to undermine human rights at the world’s flagship body. The similarities cannot be an accident: “flawed legal assumptions” (as Glaser and deLisle put it), decades of pressure, diplomatic capitulations, and weak responses from democracies neatly summarize how Xi seeks to neutralize U.N. human rights initiatives.
Re-examining five decades of diplomatic wrangling, Glaser and deLisle reveal Beijing’s assiduous efforts to present the 1971 U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758 as proof of the legality of and international support for their position, despite the fact that the text of 2758 does not reflect those ideas at all. The resolution simply switched official U.N. representation of China at the U.N. to the authorities in Beijing from those in Taiwan, and it did not address Taiwan’s own status in the body. But this has not stopped the Chinese government from building the resolution into its alternative version of history, commingling it with an insistence on the “one China” policy, by which Beijing asserts control over Taiwan — and effectively shuts it out of the U.N. The stakes are not low: as Xi threatens to take Taiwan by force, debates and positions taken at the United Nations could be decisive in shaping international responses.
Parallels on Human Rights
Three Chinese government tactics and one shortcoming by democracies regarding Resolution 2758 have clear human rights parallels. The first Chinese tactic: selective and distorted legal interpretations. When confronted in U.N. human rights bodies with critical evidence of Chinese government violations, most notably the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ August 2022 report concluding that Chinese authorities’ treatment of Uyghurs may constitute crimes against humanity, Beijing declares those positions as “smears” and “lies.” Beijing likes to suggest human rights have “Chinese characteristics,” meaning that the Chinese government will play by its own rules, not the human rights covenants it freely joined. And through slow-moving but highly corrosive challenges to norms, such as working against country-specific inquiries or removing the pursuit of accountability from the Human Rights Council’s mandate, Beijing seeks to change practice when it cannot succeed in rewriting law.
Glaser and deLisle detail the diplomatic pressure Beijing has deployed regarding Resolution 2758 on Taiwan, and a “pattern of misinterpretation, acquiescence, and misunderstanding” by U.N. officials. Here, too, the human rights parallels are disturbingly strong: Secretary-General António Guterres parroting Xi in lauding Beijing’s rights-eroding Belt and Road Initiative, High Commissioners for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet and Volker Turk engaging Beijing largely on its terms, Beijing landing another term on the Human Rights Council despite once again topping the list of governments persecuting human rights defenders who try to work with the U.N. human rights system. Beijing does not only use its economic and political clout to get other governments to vote the way it wants at the Human Rights Council and at the General Assembly on human right issues, it also threatens and harasses U.N. human rights experts, obstructs access for critical independent civil society, and seeks to create new roles within the human rights system that it can control.
Potential for Coordinated Action
For decades, democracies failed to commit sufficient resources to these challenges, missed opportunities to coordinate, and imposed few if any deterrent consequences. That pattern emboldened Beijing in its efforts to exclude Taiwan from and undermine the human rights mechanisms across the U.N. system. But the new, innovative parliamentary initiatives on Resolution 2758 show critical signs of at least some in the international community fighting back through coordinated, global, pro-democracy muscle.
Similar — and parallel — efforts are needed urgently to challenge Beijing’s threats to the U.N.’s human rights architecture. Democracies should invest far greater and longer-term resources and coordination to counter the rights-eroding conduct of Beijing and its allies. For instance, democracies could consistently emphasize the universality of international human rights law, and demonstrate their seriousness by joining all of the core international human rights instruments (the U.S., for example, has signed but not ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; Japan has not joined the Genocide Convention). They should not miss an opportunity to explain that Xi’s hostility towards U.N. human rights mechanisms is a threat not only to more than a billion people across China, but also to people worldwide.
Democracies can show they are serious about confronting Beijing’s threats to the U.N. human rights system when these bodies are politically enabled to investigate Xi’s human rights crimes, and to vanquish his claims that the U.N. supports Beijing’s “one China” policy. Let’s imagine inverting the original dispute leading to Resolution 2758 on Taiwan to show the resilience of the U.N. human rights system: rather than continuing to let Xi’s rights-violating government run for and serve on the Human Rights Council, consider empowering rights-respecting Taiwan to do so.