[London]Free Tibet Campaign is extremely disappointed at the election of China to the inaugural UN Human Rights Council. The election raises real fears that China will use its membership to sabotage meaningful and substantive reform of human rights procedures and mechanisms at the UN, as it has constantly done in the past.

Concern grew yesterday as China became one of the first 47 countries to be elected to membership of the new UN Human Rights Council. The Council has been created by the UN General Assembly on 15 March this year and replaces the older UN Commission on Human Rights. Successful country candidates required the support of at least 96 nations at the UN general Assembly with votes cast in a secret ballot.

China's election to the Council was widely predicted but as Matt Whitticase of Free Tibet Campaign said, this reflected the reality of China's increasing power and rise on the world stage and not a significant improvement in its human rights record: "China has an appalling human rights record and has done nothing to deserve membership of the new Council. At every turn it has demonstrated contempt for its obligations under international human rights law such as the Convention against Torture, whilst its track-record of failing to co-operate with UN human rights procedures and mechanisms is well-documented."

China has failed to respond to requests for fact-finding missions by 5 special procedures of the previous Commission on Human Rights whilst 5 reports to UN Treaty Bodies remain overdue from China. Indeed, China's intransigence and constant interventions to prevent the previous Commission from enacting effective human rights protection helps explain why the Commission had become largely discredited in the view of many.

As a result of China's election it is now impossible to see how the new Council will allay such fears. The EU Presidency had called on States to elect only those country candidates "best qualified to fulfil the mandate of promoting and protecting human rights. It is also the firm view that no state guilty of gross and systematic violations of human rights should serve on the Council." China clearly has no intention of meeting such criteria when, according to Amnesty International's survey for 2005, it executed 1770 of the 2148 total executed worldwide in 2005. Moreover, China has persistently ignored demands from the UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child and two UN High Commissioners on Human Rights to have independent access to Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, Tibet's 11th Panchen Lama, whom China abducted in 1995 at the age of six, and who has not been seen since.