Pictured above: The resolution, which was sponsored by USF St. Petersburg SG senators Connor Baird and Amy Campbell-Oates, denounces the “authoritarian nature” and the “numerous human rights violations” of the Chinese government “in the strongest form possible.”
Anna Bryson | The Crow’s Nest
By Dylan Hart
At a Zoom meeting on April 20, 10 Student Government senators at a small Florida university voted to officially condemn the Chinese government.
They passed a resolution, titled the “China Human Rights Resolution,” in response to recent reports of human rights and political power abuses in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region, as well as the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
The resolution, which was sponsored by USF St. Petersburg SG senators Connor Baird and Amy Campbell-Oates, denounces the “authoritarian nature” and the “numerous human rights violations” of the Chinese government “in the strongest form possible.”
Its first qualm is with how COVID-19 was handled in China. The resolution states that the United States intelligence community determined that the Chinese government failed to report its infection numbers truthfully, limiting the effectiveness of other countries’ responses to the pandemic and endangering its own citizens.
It also takes issue with the Chinese government’s usage of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where they target and intern the indigineous Uyghur people in a “reeducation” camp with a stated goal of preventing terrorism in the region.
Several United Nations members, including the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia, signed a similar document condemning this particular action last summer. The United States, which left the UN Human Rights Council in 2018, did not sign it.
A third issue regards the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, where citizens protested a bill that would allow criminals to be extradited from Hong Kong to mainland China last year. Although the bill failed, protests continued to push for more rights in Hong Kong.
The resolution condemns the government’s response to these protests, particularly “the unrestrained police force, targeting of journalists and first aid providers” and the use of Chinese military forces in the region.
Finally, it mentions that the government has permitted “unrestrained verbal and physical race motivated attacks against black members of the Chinese society.”
Baird called out China instead of other countries that may have committed human rights abuses because of the country’s geopolitical power and its authoritarian nature.
“We have the chance in our country to call out our own government,” Baird said. “And furthermore, if we don’t like who’s doing it, we vote them out. We have elections all the time. The Chinese citizens don’t have that opportunity. So it falls on us to try and speak for (them).”
Although the senate’s position may be miniscule compared to a world government, Baird stressed what he views as the importance of the resolution.
“I know that our voice coming from a satellite university in St. Petersburg, Florida, may seem a bit small, but I think that it’s precisely at a university where the world begins to change, because we educate people of what’s going on around the world,” he said.
“I think we need to try to hold a vision that this world can change, and it changes with university students like us around the free world.”
