Executive Summary

Throughout the world, terrorism continues to pose major threats to peace, security, and stability. Since September 11, 2001, intensified counter-terrorism debates and responses, including national, multilateral, and regional approaches, have been marked by trends posing complex challenges to the protection of international human rights and fundamental freedoms. The current normative international framework and consensus clearly recognize that respect for human rights is not only the legal and moral obligation of states, but an essential pillar in the promotion of sustainable and effective counter-terrorism approaches. Yet, human rights violations related to and resulting from counter-terrorism measures continue; at the same time, there is push-back in the international community against those measures that violate human rights, such as extraordinary rendition, secret detentions, and torture and other inhumane treatment and abuses prohibited by jus cogens norms.

Within this international counter-terrorism framework, the role of regional organizations in the promotion of international peace and security is accorded special recognition and legitimacy, in light of these organizations’ presumed local experience and expertise. This whitepaper examines one such regional organization in operation since 2001: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), comprising the People’s Republic of China (PRC or “China”), the Russian Federation (“Russia”), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, states with a total population of approximately 1.5 billion. As a regional intergovernmental organization, the SCO is intended to enhance mutual security and cooperation between its member states, and takes as its core principles the respect of sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs, and territorial integrity. While the SCO facilitates multilateral cooperation among its members in a variety of fields, including the economy, cultural exchange, and health initiatives, this whitepaper focuses on the SCO framework for security and counter-terrorism measures and the key role of China in that framework; identifies the human rights concerns raised by SCO structure, policies, and practices; and analyzes the SCO’s impact on international human rights norms and standards and on the international counter-terrorism framework. 

As a regional organization holding United Nations (UN) observer status, and with two permanent members on the UN Security Council – the leading UN body tasked with an international peace and security mandate – the SCO plays a critical role in shaping ongoing international counter-terrorism policy debates and developing practices and norms. The impact of the SCO extends well beyond the territories of its member states, through its engagement with India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan (SCO observer status states), Belarus and Sri Lanka (SCO dialogue partners), and through an expanding bilateral relationship with the UN, including joint cooperation in the fight against terrorism. Reflecting assumptions that regional and subregional organizations are better positioned to understand the root causes of many regional conflicts, however, and the belief that “[r]egional problems demand regional solutions,”¹ the policies and practices of the SCO have been given an uncritical free pass by key UN bodies and officials and in relevant international debates. Indeed, SCO-UN cooperation has expanded rapidly in recent years without critical attention to the human rights issues the SCO presents.

In the span of a decade, the SCO has also emerged on the international stage as an alternative mechanism for consensus-building in Eurasia. References to the SCO in the media and by governments range from assessments of whether the organization constitutes a geo-political “counter-weight” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and whether it will constrain U.S. involvement in Central Asia, to whether it offers a new world order for the future, as the organization already includes a quarter of the world’s population and its membership is likely to increase. Yet, this geo-political debate overlooks the enormous impact of the SCO on its core constituency – the SCO member states’ own citizens – and on the international human rights system.

This whitepaper analyzes aspects of the SCO that present fundamental challenges to the international community’s efforts to ensure protection of human rights in counter-terrorism approaches, including within the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. These problematic SCO policies and practices include:

• An overbroad scope of targeted behavior to which member state “counter-terrorism” obligations apply, based on the “Three Evils” doctrine advanced by the Chinese government. Each of the Three Evils – terrorism, separatism, and extremism – are of equal weight and criminality in the SCO framework. Reliance on the Three Evils doctrine is highly problematic in light of the Chinese government’s record of characterizing the legitimate exercise of religious, ethnic, cultural, and other rights as separatism or extremism, particularly in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
• An overbroad definition of “terrorism” that relies heavily on ideology, rather than fully incorporating the internationally-accepted components of terrorism relating to intention, purpose, and offensive act. This SCO definition, along with the Three Evils doctrine, raises the issue of compliance with the principle of legality. Further human rights concerns are presented by the uncritical acceptance and citation of this broad formulation by key UN bodies and officials, including the UN Secretary-General, and the potential of such formulation to undermine the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy,² in particular the “fourth pillar” of that strategy – respect for human rights and the rule of law as the fundamental basis for the fight against terrorism.
• Intelligence practices that compromise international due process and non-discrimination guarantees and the right to privacy, including cooperative surveillance, a shared database, and blacklists, all of which are coordinated through the SCO’s Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) and lack transparency, meaningful safeguards, and accountability mechanisms.
• Guaranteed extraditions or “returns” of wanted individuals among member states that in many cases contravene the obligation of non-refoulement, a principle of international law; and outright denials of asylum without due process protections.
• Military and law enforcement cooperation, including a trend of expanding militarization of the region, that is designed to send a chilling message to targeted groups – member states’ “problem” populations – and reinforce domestic control through the threat of force.

In spite of these serious human rights concerns, the international appeal of the SCO is largely unquestioned. Such appeal – which is currently generating interest in full membership by influential states such as India, Iran, and Pakistan – is most likely due to the SCO’s “come as you are” approach of non-interference in internal affairs, its prioritization of member state stability regardless of the often heavy-handed tactics of member regimes, and its unparalleled capacity to marshal resources to apply to some of the world’s toughest hot spots (such as Afghanistan) in the face of the global economic crisis. Governments and international organizations have turned to the SCO for assistance in addressing such issues as cooperation on energy, the financial crisis, military bases and dialogue, and control of the movement of drugs, weapons, and terrorists within Afghanistan and Central Asian states, without rigorously assessing the long-term impact of this engagement, or challenging the SCO to address its own and its member states’ human rights shortcomings. 

SCO member states for their part have quite deliberately used this opportunity to advance their respective agendas on the international stage, under cover of the regional framework. Doing so has allowed them to deflect critical scrutiny of the serious human rights problems identified by international human rights monitoring bodies and thus avoid the need to account for them. These problems include crackdowns and abuses related to individual exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms, and systemic issues such as torture, inhumane prison conditions, extra-legal detention, corruption, lack of an independent judiciary and of effective remedies, discrimination against and targeting of ethnic and other vulnerable groups, and trafficking of and violence against women and children.

This whitepaper argues that the international community, and the UN in particular as it deepens and expands its engagement with the SCO, must urgently address the human rights risks posed by each SCO member state and by the collective SCO framework, policies, and practices. The SCO approach to counter-terrorism, modeled on China’s Three Evils doctrine, and highlighting principles of territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, and social stability, contributes to supporting repressive regimes at the expense of national, regional, and global human rights. The ongoing failure to demand accountability from regional frameworks such as the SCO also undermines the effectiveness and integrity of the international system in countering terrorism and advancing rule of law, peace, and security.

With a view towards contributing constructively to promoting greater effectiveness and accountability of regional and international frameworks, this whitepaper offers a number of specific and concrete policy and practice recommendations directed to UN bodies, governments, civil society actors, and the SCO and its member states. To advance greater transparency of the SCO’s structure, policies, and practices, this whitepaper also provides an extensive compilation of core documents and resources in the appendices. Human Rights in China hopes that this compilation of key SCO normative documents, publicly-available information on the activities of the organization, and analysis of these materials from an international human rights law perspective, will serve as a resource for generating real accountability within the SCO, and promoting a more constructive engagement between the SCO and the international community that contributes to advancing fundamental rights and freedoms in the region and in the world.

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