https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17735/china-belt-road-human-rights
Findings about BRI’s negative impact on human rights in Cambodia and Guinea raise the much wider issue of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative affects human rights worldwide. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, around 139 countries — more than half the countries in the world — have now joined BRI.
China has also invested in multiple large-scale BRI projects in Iran, which has reportedly been leasing out its territorial waters in the Persian Gulf to Chinese industrial ships for more than a decade. This arrangement has led to a situation… where Chinese fishing vessels are “illegally cleaning out fish resources in the Persian Gulf” while “Iranian fishermen are forced to pay ten thousand dollars in bribes to Somalian pirates to let them fish on the African shores”.
Such a compromise of locals’ food-and-income security is a measure of China’s influence in the country — and a practice coupled with the Iranian government’s disregard for the living conditions of its own citizens. Scant regard for human rights is presumably also one of the reasons why China prefers to deal with autocratic regimes.
A new report, “Underwater: Human Rights Impacts of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia,” has found that one of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Cambodia — a hydroelectric dam known as the Lower Sesan 2, completed in 2018 — resulted in severe human rights violations. The project displaced nearly 5,000 mainly indigenous people and ethnic minorities, who had lived in villages along the Sesan and Srepok Rivers for generations, earning a living from fishing and agriculture. The project, the report estimates, negatively affected the lives of tens of thousands of other locals, who depend on fishing in the rivers for food and income. The project compromised locals’ food security, and their losses were either inadequately compensated or not compensated at all. The Lower Sesan 2 is just one out of seven BRI hydroelectric projects in Cambodia.