4 No. 67 JUSTICE e are witnessing an important historical inflection moment, reflecting not only the global COVID-19 pandemic, but a global political pandemic characterized by a resurgent global authoritarianism, the backsliding of democracies, the assault on human rights, and political prisoners as a looking glass – the whole underpinned by yet another pandemic, the pandemic of impunity. Accordingly, I would like to share four case studies of this political pandemic – and the pandemic of impunity – as well as the human rights advocacy that can address and redress it, and which can help secure justice for the victims and accountability for the human rights violators. This is also where the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IJL) can play an important role in this effort. I. Case Study: Xi Jinping’s China The first case study is that of Xi Jinping’s China – and I use that term to distinguish it from the people and publics of China who are otherwise the targets of Xi Jinping’s massive domestic oppression – which represents today the most serious assault on the rulesbased international legal order; and which includes, increasingly under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic, the targeting of what Xi Jinping has called “the five poisons”: the mass atrocities against the Uyghurs; the frontal assaults not only on the democracy movement in Hong Kong but on democracy itself; the persecution and prosecution of the Falun Gong singled out for “eradication”; the ongoing repression of Tibet; and the threatening of Taiwan. There is more. What is not so well known is that China jails more journalists than any other country in the world, as well as human rights defenders and the lawyers who would represent them. It was this culture of suppressing information, and jailing dissidents, doctors, and lawyers and human rights defenders, that covered up and thereby precipitated the spread of the coronavirus.1 Moreover, this was accompanied by a parallel global disinformation and penetration campaign, which the Canadian Parliamentary Committee on National Intelligence said constituted a threat not only to the national security of Canada – in terms of Xi Jinping’s penetration into Canada – but indeed a threat to our democracy. However, it was the mass atrocities against the Uyghurs that the Canadian Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee on Human Rights – and later the Canadian Parliament – said were acts constitutive of genocide that represent the most serious and threatening assault on the rulesbased international order. I testified before this committee in July 2020, wherein I first shared evidence that these mass atrocities were acts constitutive of genocide. Just before I was to testify, I witnessed evocative and chilling images of Uyghurs blindfolded, shackled, and with their heads shaven, boarding trains to concentration camps. I make no analogies to the Holocaust – not even when speaking of the genocide of the Uyghurs – but it is impossible to ignore these evocative, chilling images. I then shared with the Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee the evidence that these mass atrocities were acts constitutive of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention and which included: the mass incarceration of over one million Uyghurs in concentration camps – The Global Political Pandemic, and the Pandemic of Impunity: Political Prisoners as a Looking Glass* W IrwinCotler * This article is an updated (Aug. 2021) and expanded version of Prof. Cotler's keynote presentation at the IJL's 17th Congress, December 6, 2020. 1. Irwin Cotler and Judith Abitan,“The Chinese Communist Party’s culture of corruption and repression has cost lives around the world,”THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Apr. 14, 2020, available at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/ article-the-chinese-communist-partys-culture-ofcorruption-and-repression-has/
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=