Taoiseach Micheál Martin told the Dáil on Wednesday that he raised a number of human rights issues during a recent visit to China, including the sentencing of Jimmy Lai.
Mr Lai, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy media tycoon and Catholic, was jailed for 20 years in February for colluding with foreign forces under the city’s national security law.
Mr Martin had been urged to raise human rights concerns during the visit, which was the first by a sitting Taoiseach. During the visit, he met with the top figures in the Communist Party hierarchy: President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang and National People’s Congress chairman Zhao Leji.
The 78 year-old’s sentence has been described as a death sentence by right’s groups, with the punishment the harshest to be handed down under the law, which was introduced following 2019 protests demanding more freedom.
Mr Lai has been in detention for five years, with most of his time spent behind bars spent in solitary confinement. Lawyers for the former media owner highlighted that Mr Lai suffers from hypertension, diabetes, cataracts and a blocked vein in the eye, complaining that prison authorities only gave him heavily redacted medical notes for his client.
His legal team has said that the businessman has been refused independent medical intervention for diabetes and is only allowed to leave his cell for 50 minutes per day.
Amid backlash from the international community over the treatment of Mr Lai and other pro-democracy campaigners, the alarm has also been raised over China’s treatment of the Uyghur people, against whom the Government stands accused of genocide.
Beijing’s autocratic regime has overseen the detention of up to two million Uyghur Muslims in camps in the region of Xinjiang in north-west China. Beijing has also been accused of the forced harvesting of the organs of prisoners from minority groups and sometimes selling them to wealthy recipients for large sums of money.
An Taoiseach Micheál Martin said today that he raised both the treatment of Lai and that of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.
Mr Martin said that he had asked for Mr Lai to be released on humanitarian grounds, given his age – but added that Chinese leaders “strongly” defended Mr Lai’s imprisonment.
Asked to report on his recent visit to China by a number of TDs, Mr Martin said:
“I raised a number of human rights issues, including Jimmy Lai’s sentencing, the situation of minorities in Xinjiang, and the human rights situation in Tibet. My meeting with the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party was similarly positive.”
He added: “They defend their position on the Jimmy Lai case. It was quite a lengthy conversation with the Premier in respect of that case and in respect of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. They invited us to go down, which they do with all ambassadors in particular.
“It is my understanding that our ambassador was going to go down. Some ask if one can have freedom to move around and so on. However, our ambassador indicated to me that he would go down in terms of having an assessment of the situation as best one can given that it is, as Deputy Hayes said, a different model in terms of how it works as a society and as a system.
“We have expressed very strong concerns. I asked that he be released, even on humanitarian grounds, given his age and so on but there was quite a robust response, to be honest, and they defended it strongly.
“Our embassy is following that very strongly,” he further claimed. “We have a consulate general in Hong Kong. We also raised the issue of Tibet. We do that at the UN, in our work with the European Union and so on.”
Mr Martin added: “In terms of our relationships globally, we have a twin-track approach essentially. That is a values approach, a multilateralism approach and also looking at interests.
“Ireland cannot resolve every system in the world. It cannot fix every system. We have to engage and we have to have dialogue. A lot of the dialogue was positive.”
The daughter of Jimmy Lai, previously expressed fears that he will die a “martyr” in prison.
“He has failing eyesight and failing hearing, he has fingernails that turn purplish-grey and sometimes fall off, he has teeth that are rotting, he has back and waist pains and some days it’s painful for him to stand,” Claire Lai, who has seen her father in prison, told the BBC last December prior to his prison sentence.
US President Donald Trump said last year that he had asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to “consider” releasing Mr Lai, telling reporters:“I feel so badly. I spoke to President Xi about it and I asked to consider his release.”
The UK similarly called for the 78-year-old to be “immediately released,” as UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper slammed the sentencing as “politically motivated persecution.”