The reason I raise this item on the Adjournment is that I was privileged to meet the sister of Mr. Wei Jingsheng, Ms Wei Sansan, at a meeting sponsored by the International Commission of Jurists and by Amnesty International in Ireland. Mr. Wei Jingsheng is now serving his second sentence of 14 years. Previously, he was sentenced to a period of 15 years' imprisonment, which was curtailed near its end, for placing democracy posters on Democracy Wall in Peking in the period of great unrest in the People's Republic of China in 1979. He served 13½ years of his 15 year sentence. During that period he suffered tremendous hardship and deprivation, losing many of his teeth and developing a heart condition sitting in a primitive cell in a distant part of China, simply for expressing his true conviction about the need for democracy and liberty in China.
As part of China's effort to conduct a charm offensive internationally to get the 2000 Olympic games moved to Peking he was released as a result of American pressure. Many people in his circumstances would have simply said they had played their part for liberty and democracy and fade quietly into the background. On his release he again compaigned for liberty and democracy in China. He met an American diplomat and set up a movement in China for liberty and democracy. He was arrested shortly after meeting the American diplomat and detained without a warrant for a number of months. Subsequently he was placed on trial on a charge of conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the People's Republic of China. He was indicted and convicted at a show trial and handed down a sentence of 14 years to be served in the prison from which he had been released on 13 December 1995.
His crime is simply that he supports liberty and democracy. It is probable, bearing in mind the suffering he endured on the last occasion, that he will die in prison unless international opinion is mobilised to stand by him and to vindicate, not merely his rights but the rights for which he has sacrificed so much over the last 15 or 20 years.
I am calling on this House to bear witness to his struggle and on the Government to raise the issue of how this man has been treated — he is by no means alone but he is one person of whom we have been made aware by Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists — and to take the opportunity of the forthcoming conference in Geneva in March to press for international condemnation of the systematic abuse of civil liberties and suppression of human rights in China by the Government of the People's Republic of China. I ask the Government to bring the matter further than it has done before and not merely to support EU resolutions in that regard but to use our position as a non-aligned country to advocate strongly to other countries, who have hesitated in the past, to take a strong stance in support civil liberties in China and not to allow this man's suffering and persecution to be in vain.