Lord Alton of Liverpool – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Alton of Liverpool on 2016-09-12.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the effectiveness of the UK–China Human Rights Dialogue and the EU–China Human Rights Dialogue, and whether they will establish specific benchmarks for progress in those dialogues.
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
The UK-China Human Rights Dialogue provides a platform to highlight a wide range of the Government’s human rights concerns to relevant Chinese officials. It also provides an opportunity for frank, expert exchanges on policies as they are applied in the UK and China. In recent years workshop themes have included: judicial procedures; disability rights; and minority languages.
The Dialogue is an addition to, rather than a replacement for discussions in other bilateral and multilateral fora. It is one part of our strategy to promote British values in China, and we do not have benchmarks to measure the Dialogue in isolation. We do measure progress against our overall strategy and we report on it in the FCO Annual Human Rights report.
The EU-China Human Rights dialogue functions in a similar way, and we engage closely with the organisers to share views and objectives. We are confident that the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue is coherent with UK objectives.
