Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) and Co-Chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, today issued the following statement on the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

            “Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, also known as the UDHR. 

            This landmark document sought to acknowledge universal principles that undergird human dignity in the wake of the genocidal horrors of World War II, as documented in particular at the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals.

            In seeking to determine what rights are truly universal, the UDHR drafters canvassed a wide range of world traditions to make sure the Declaration truly was ‘universal,’ and not simply reflective of one tradition.

            Today, the Chinese Communist Party under General Secretary Xi Jinping is the greatest enemy of human dignity. From forced labor to forced organ harvesting, from concentration camps to genocide, the horrors that humanity thought it had put behind it are being replayed in Xi Jinping’s China. 

            P.C. Chang, a Chinese scholar and diplomat, was one of the principal contributors to the text of the UDHR and deserves greater recognition today. Chang believed that many of the freedoms and rights recognized in the West are also deeply embedded principles in Chinese culture, though they are not expressed politically and institutionally in the same way.  He sought to have those principles reflected in the UDHR. This history exposes as a lie the contemporary claim by the PRC that there is no such thing as universal rights, and that calling the PRC to account for human rights abuses is an imposition of ‘Western’ values.

            Rather, the universal nature of human rights is one that is consonant with the Chinese tradition, and the UDHR provides a standard against which the CCP can be judged and held accountable.”

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