- A senior member of the European Parliament expressed significant concerns about the EU’s investment agreement with China over its alleged human rights violations and fears that this could damage relations with the new Biden government.
- The EU-China investment agreement aims to liberalize trade between Beijing and Brussels and was closed in late December after last-minute concessions from Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping.
- But there is growing concern in the European Parliament, which has yet to approve the deal, about the deal given China’s human rights record on issues such as alleged forced labor camps and a crackdown in Hong Kong that started last year.
- “Putting a Christmas present under Xi Jinping’s Christmas tree after the year we had with China is overkill,” Reinhard Bütikofer, president of the European Parliament’s delegation in China, said in an interview with Insider this week.
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A senior member of the European Parliament expressed significant concerns about the EU’s investment agreement with China over its alleged human rights violations and fears that this could damage relations with the new Biden government.
The EU-China investment agreement aims to liberalize trade between Beijing and Brussels and was closed in late December after last-minute concessions from Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping.
But there is growing concern in the European Parliament, which has yet to approve the deal, due to China’s human rights record, alleged forced labor camps and a crackdown in Hong Kong that began last year.
“Putting a Christmas present under Xi Jinping’s Christmas tree after the year we had with China is overkill,” Reinhard Bütikofer, president of the European Parliament’s delegation in China, said in an interview with Insider this week.
The full text of the so-called Comprehensive Investment Agreement (CAI) has not yet been published, but criticism about the content of the business is growing.
Bütikofer said the European Parliament’s demands for the agreement to contain a clause linking China to international agreements on modern slavery have been ignored. Instead, the agreement contains only a non-binding commitment by China “to make sustained and sustained efforts” to ratify the International Labor Organization’s Conventions on forced labor.
“We demand practical measures and guarantees, and the business is full of hot air,” said Bütikofer.
These concerns were reflected in a letter sent by a group of MEPs to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen this week, which was reported by The Diplomat magazine.
The appeal, which dozens of civil rights groups also signed, said that CAI “sends a signal that the European Union will press for closer cooperation” with China, regardless of the scale and severity of the Party’s human rights abuses. Chinese Communist. “
These concerns are mainly concentrated in the Xianjing region of northwest China, where the UN says the government has detained more than one million Uighur Muslims, some of them used for the purpose of forced labor. China rejects the accusations.
Another concern is the impact that the agreement may have on transatlantic relations. The deal was struck just a few weeks before President-elect Joe Biden took office, prompting critics of the deal to suggest it was signed just before the new government – which promised to take a hard line on China – had time to object.
Biden’s national security adviser has already expressed concern about the trade deal. It remains to be seen how much pressure Washington will try to exert on Brussels over the agreement.
“Doing this business just days before President-elect Biden takes office is very unfortunate,” said Bütikofer.
“It seems that the European Union saw more need to demonstrate to the United States that we can be strategically autonomous than to signal to Beijing that we want to cooperate more actively and more consistently with the United States. I think this is a highly questionable priority, “he said.