Once-taboo human rights now in Constitution

• Source: Global Times
• [22:33 October 13 2009]
• Comments

Guo Daohui

Editor's Note:

China's human rights developed from a political taboo to constitutional rights in the past 60 years. The following is an interview by the Guangzhou-based Nanfengchuang magazine (NFC) with Guo Daohui (Guo), a consultant at the Jurisprudence Research Association of the China Law Society, on the development of and existing problems with human rights in China.

NFC: For a long period after the founding of PRC, human rights issue was a taboo subject. How was the taboo broken?

Guo: In the first 30 years of New China, quite apart from the lack of protection of human rights, the human rights issue itself was a taboo for researchers. This taboo was gradually broken over the next 30 years.

The first step was made in the Third Plenary Session of 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1978. Although the human rights issue was ideologically regarded as a bourgeois slogan then, some leaders began to attach importance to it.

One manifestation was the project of redressing unjust, false and wrong cases where some officials, democrats, and intellectuals had been persecuted.

In the early 1990s, in response to the West's criticism of China's human rights, the Publicity Department of the CPC for the first time convened two expert forums to discuss the issue.

On November 2, 1991, the State Council Information Office issued the first white paper describing China's human rights situation.