CHINA: Human rights a thorny issue in China's relations with the West, writes Clifford Coonan in Beijing
United Nations' human rights chief Louise Arbour arrived in Beijing this week to meet senior Communist party officials for talks which would focus on China's much criticised justice system, including torture, arbitrary jailing and the alarming number of executions.
Louise Arbour was formerly an international war crimes prosecutor and the position has long proven a tricky one in China, particularly since Mary Robinson, the previous incumbent, made seven trips to China and never shied from slamming China's rights' record.
On Chinese prompting, Ms Arbour will visit the Sunshine correctional facility, considered a great example of jail as rehabilitation.
Rows over textile quotas, technology transfers and Taiwan notwithstanding, human rights remain a thorny issue in China's relations with the West.
The commissioner arrived in the Chinese capital just as police raided the office of the Empowerment and Rights Institute, an NGO which helps farmers and others deal with complaints against the government.
The group's founder, Hou Wenzhou, a Harvard-educated lawyer who has previously spoken to The Irish Times but could not be reached for this article, said police were watching her home. She said she was worried she might be detained to prevent her meeting Ms Arbour.
Nearly all of China's active dissidents have been exiled or imprisoned. The West wants China to do more to improve the quality of its judiciary, to reduce the number of executions - currently 12,000 a year, more than the rest of the world combined - and stop hounding and jailing dissidents.
The debate ebbs and flows in the West, particularly because the Chinese economy represents such a huge financial opportunity to Western countries, including Ireland.
The US State Department recently issued a stern report that said Beijing had used the global war on terrorism to crack down on peaceful opponents and committed other persistent abuses.
However, the Chinese have responded quickly in claiming the moral high ground. Beijing says the behaviour of the US government in Iraq and the treatment of prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay prison shows that Washington should examine its own dirty laundry first.
The key word in the Communists' response to the criticisms of the West is "stability", a byword for control.
When dealing with change in China, it's always important to keep in mind that nothing happens overnight, and there is a strong move within areas of the government to change things.
Beijing responds to Western criticism by pointing to the fact that China is still a developing country. The government says increased wealth has translated into better human rights in the shape of improved living standards, a take on the old Bertold Brecht dictum: "Food comes first, morals follow on".
Although he is not the liberal reformer some thought he might be when he took office, president Hu Jintao has called for more "socialist democracy" and there has been a definite opening up in China. Rules dictating where Chinese can live or work, and even whom they could marry, have been abolished.
China's parliament recently passed a bill which allows for policemen who torture detainees to be punished. While this may sound like a small development in Western terms, within the broader Chinese context, where such behaviour is commonplace, the new law is very significant.
And it is true that strong economic growth has given millions of Chinese more of a say in the day-to-day running of their lives.
The government is engaged in a highly public campaign to crack down on the corruption which has blighted the country and which it once denied existed. The media, although still tightly controlled, has a lot more freedom than previously.
Ms Arbour will meet China's justice minister to discuss what reforms China needs to make to its legal system before it can ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
China signed the pact back in 1998 but has yet to join 154 countries in ratifying it.
Ms Arbour's office said the covenant would be on the agenda, but insisted that significant changes were needed to allow China to sign.
China currently has the biggest prison population in the world, with 1.5 million inmates held in 670 jails and the court system is widely criticised by human rights groups as a joke.
The jailing of two high-profile journalists working for foreign media organisations, as well as the detention of Chinese academics critical of the government, shows the Communist Party is determined not to let that control slip.
Human rights are not much of an issue among many young Chinese, who tend to shrug their shoulders and focus on making money.
There are areas of the Chinese judicial system that seem totally at odds with systems in the West. One of these areas is lao gai, which means "re-education through labour", basically gulags for criminals, dissidents or other undesirables, where people can be jailed for up to four years without being charged.
The lao gai are looking increasingly anachronistic in a China that is playing an ever bigger role on the international stage and the government is talking about introducing an appeals system and making sure that no one spends more than 18 months in a lao gai. State figures put the lao gai population at around 26,000.
And there are other signs that people within China are unhappy with what they see as transgressions of their human rights.
One case in March raised public hackles, after a man spent 11 years in jail for murdering his wife, before the woman turned up alive and well. The victim of this particular miscarriage of justice was kept awake for 11 days and nights while police beat and tortured him until he confessed.There have been other high-profile stories about the use of torture leading to a miscarriage of justice. In Hebei province, Nie Shubing was executed in 1995 for raping and killing a woman after he confessed under torture.
His innocence was discovered last month when the real killer was arrested for other crimes.