About this Event
Date: 7 December 2020
Time: 2- 3:30 pm GMT
Location: Online
Abstract: The People’s Republic of China underwent its third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations in Geneva on 6 November 2018. Two years after the UPR and at a time of growing concern about crimes against humanity in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the destruction of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s rule of law based system, and continued systematic human rights violations, including the denial of access to justice throughout China’s mainland, Civil Society Organisations have criticised China’s performance as ‘disqualifying’ (CHRD) and expressed deep concern about China’s growing influence at the UN (Sophie Richardson, HRW). This panel discussion brings experts from academia and civil society together for a discussion of China’s growing role and influence in the United Nations Human Rights System as well as an assessment of recent developments in XUAR and Hong Kong in relation to recommendations put forward during China’s third UPR.
Speaker bios
Matthieu Burnay (Chair) is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Global Law at Queen Mary University of London. He has an interdisciplinary background in law, political science and history. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Leuven and a Double MSc degree in International Affairs from Peking University and the London School of Economics. His main research interests are in global law and governance; the study of the political and legal aspects of EU-China relations in global governance; as well as the comparative study of the rule of law in Europe and Asia. He is particularly interested in the relationship between international law and Chinese law in the areas of international security and trade governance. His monograph ‘Chinese Perspectives on the International Rule of Law: Law and Politics in the One-Party State’ was published by Edward Elgar in 2018. In 2018, he was awarded a Jean Monnet Network on EU-China Legal and Judicial Cooperation (EUPLANT).
Frances Eve is the deputy director of research at the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a non-governmental organization of domestic and overseas Chinese human rights activists and groups headquartered in Washington DC.
Eva Pils is Professor of Law at King’s College London and an affiliated scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School. She studied law, philosophy and sinology in Heidelberg, London and Beijing and holds a PhD in law from University College London. Her current research addresses autocratic conceptions and practices of governance and dimensions of legal and political resistance at domestic and global levels, and she is working on a book on the rule of law and its opponents in the People’s Republic of China (forthcoming with Hart). Her most recent book, Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism, was published in 2018. At King’s, she teaches courses on human rights; law and society in China; and authoritarianism, populism and the law. Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She has held visiting appointments at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at Columbia University (New York).
Maya Wang is a senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch. Maya Wang has written extensively on the use of torture, arbitrary detention, human rights defenders, civil society, Hong Kong, and the use of technology in mass surveillance and social control in China. Her latest report, China’s Algorithms of Repression: Reverse Engineering a Xinjiang Police Mass Surveillance App, and her series of press releases on China’s mass biometric collection and artificial intelligence from 2017 has contributed to a wave of international attention on China’s mass surveillance practices in Xinjiang, China and globally.
**Please note this is an online event and that all registrants will be sent joining instructions the day before
