End of Impunity Movement is a Part of Democratic Movement

Yang Jianli and Xiao Qiang

1/6/2001

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) autocratic machine has many gears of different sizes ¾ the party, government, military and police bureaucrats. Although they play different roles, a majority of them, after being in operation on the machine for five decades, have nurtured and grown firm many ugly and malicious customs in their minds and behaviors. Among these customs, two are directly hurting and even torturing the average people. One is political repression and the other corruption. When an autocratic kingdom is in its final days, the two evil customs start to explode into actions. The whole Mainland China today appears to be experiencing such an explosion.

The cases and degrees of corruption, if taken just from those disclosed by the Chinese authorities, are already astonishingly shocking. Yet countless corrupted officials are being protected, and undisclosed cases can only be even more appalling. Let’s however focus more on the problem of repression. Since coming to the power, the CCP has never stopped political repression even for a single day. Political repression is everywhere from way up in the central government to down in small villages, inside the party and outside, in politics and economics, among the intellectuals as well as religion believers, for literature and martial arts, and for issues of human rights and ethnic interests. Repression has never been absent at any corner of the Chinese society. Up till today, China still has thousands of political prisoners and tens of thousands of Falungong practitioners in jail. We know that about a hundred Falungong believers have been tortured to death in Chinese prisons. A number of democratic activists are being tortured in mental hospitals and some female Falungong believers were subject to appalling sexual tortures in jail. Repression, just as corruption, has really become something in many CCP officials’ blood. It is an important part of their life now. They resort to repression to defeat their political rivals, to get awards from their bosses, to protect their own economic interests, to legitimize their corruption, and to subject the people they rule to terror. Repression has even become a way of entertainment for some CCP bureaucrats!

The general public has realized that repression and corruption are actually not a result of merely individual officers but of the entire CCP system. Indeed, the evil deeds of those CCP bureaucrats can hardly be attributed only to “undisciplined individuals” or innocent “errors in carrying out CCP policies”. They are rather an inevitable outcome of the autocratic system. This situation has been appropriately termed by many in recent years as “systematic corruption” and “systematic repression”. This is a qualitative leap forward because it makes us think about the problems and seek answers more from the point of view of the political system. It is an important leap forward as well for China’s constitutional reconstruction.

While feeling positively about our macroscopic view on the issue, we can’t ignore a microscopic dilemma in association with the transformation of an old system and the establishment of a new. That is how we deal with those bureaucrats who directly committed crimes of repression and corruption. In a society, the essential meaning of establishing an advanced and humane system is exactly to eliminate or at least significantly reduce inhumane malignancies in the old system. However, if justice can’t be served against the old evil acts, the new system will find itself lack of public faith and support. Since after the CCP grabbed the ruling power, the Mainland China has been put through countless number of political catastrophes. After each of these catastrophes, the direct criminals were always able to find a way to shovel the responsibilities to the parties who were either dead (such as Mao Zedong and possibly Deng Xiaoping for June Fourth), or losers in CCP’s political games (such as the “Gang of Four”). They could also blame political tragedies on the “mistakes” made when implementing a policy (such as the expansion of the “anti-rightists” campaign). Mostly, those who directly committed crimes were hardly brought to justice. Therefore, hatreds kept accumulating one after another throughout these catastrophic events in China, which in turn pushed the entire society onto a runway built on twisted interpersonal relations among the people. This is actually one of the major root causes that led to widespread complaints of “moral decay” in today’s China. It is foreseeable that if the hatreds precipitated from decades of CCP rule can’t be rationally resolved, especially if the criminals of political repression and corruption can’t be brought to justice, a newly established democracy will inevitably be subject to a long period of instability and vicious cycles of turmoil. People will not be happy and the new democracy will not be able to function normally.

Since the 1970’s, a new human rights movement known as the “End of Impunity” has appeared on the international stage. It was originated from the fact that many victims of human rights violation in the Latin-American countries could never get back their justice because of the autocratic rule of their government. As a matter of fact, even after the collapse of the autocratic regime and the establishment of a democracy in their country, they still found themselves to have lost all the opportunities to bring human rights violators to justice due to various reasons. Therefore, many of those victims and human rights activists started a movement that was aimed to get the truth of each and every known case of human rights violations and to go all the way after the very responsible parties, such as vicious policy makers and those evil executors.

This movement gained widespread support in the 1980’s from the people of many countries. Since the early 1990’s, the UN (United Nations) has also been paying a close attention to it. Starting from the later 80’s, the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities under the UN Commission of Human Rights in Geneva appointed special investigators to investigate gross human rights violations in Latin-American countries. Especially included in the investigation was the issue of unpunished human rights criminals, i.e., the impunity problem. At the 1996 and 1997 plenary session of this sub-commission, the special investigators presented their reports on the issue of impunity. They recommended to the UN to set up some standards to end impunity, based on which individual countries can have their own laws in this regard. The End of Impunity movement has since become an important component of the international human rights movement and made a great contribution to the effort of perfecting the world’s human rights protection mechanism.

The international End of Impunity movement is a great inspiration to us. The concept should also be applied to punishments to CCP’s acts of political repression and corruption. End of impunity in these cases should include searching and collecting evidences as well as fair court trials. Apparently, in the current Chinese system, fair trials are simply impossible. But we can start searching and collecting evidences right away. We should find and keep records detailing the repression and corruption of CCP bureaucrats (including the police) at all possible levels. The direct victims and their relatives particularly need to do so. Their overseas friends should help them keep evidences in secured places. Chinese democrats, Falungong believers, the minority people and so on should all set up their databases and information centers for these evidences.

At this time, the End of Impunity movement should become an important work for the Chinese human rights and democratic movement. If we don’t act now, it’ll be much more difficult in the future. Obviously, the longer we wait the harder it’ll be to collect evidences. It may even become impossible. According to the special investigative report for the aforementioned UN sub-commission, “impunity” means the following. Because unable to conduct any investigation and thus impossible to find the criminal, civil, administrative or disciplinary responsibilities of human rights violators. Without this type of investigations, it’ll be impossible to sue, arrest, convict and determine the offenders’ crime or sentences, and thus impossible to compensate the victims. On the other hand, the End of Impunity movement should be able to contain CCP’s ongoing crimes to a certain extent. We believe that a police officer will behave better, to some degree, if he realizes that his acts of torturing political prisoners or Falungong believers will be recorded and the evidences will be collected and kept.

We are not advocating a movement of revenge. Much to the opposite, one of our intents in promoting an End of Impunity movement in China is to avoid out-of-control violent revenges, in addition to putting the CCP’s bureaucrats on check for their inhumane behaviors. It is also to seek justice within an open and fair legal framework, to rationally end the messy history under the CCP, and to cleanly start a democratic era with good running cycles. Therefore, an End of Impunity movement will help us strengthen our belief in rule of law, which has worn very thin in the minds of many Chinese. From this prospective, it is also a very important component of the Chinese constitutional democracy movement.