You’re listening to part two of an interview with Cristina Cevallos, a first-place winner of the 2025 Human Rights Essay Contest hosted by The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights. The interview is conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. To listen to the rest of this interview, check the link in the description or go to humanrights.catholic.edu.
William Saunders: So what’s your third step?
Cristina Cevallos: Third step is supporting organizations. Here we need to distinguish – they are both important – the ones advocating against CCP, helping people who are persecuted in China and other communist countries, but also the ones that are promoting Western values. So the government can give funds to these organizations to support them and to give assistance for the individual goals they have.
So NGOs, civil society, they’re all working, advocating for these people or trying to get this message everywhere they can.
W: Okay. So the US should work with these democracy-promoting organizations and others. Okay. What’s the fourth step?
C: Fourth step is action to diplomacy. So the US is one of the countries that everyone wants to hear in international forums, and it has a great chance to speak about these issues in the UN, for example, and the Asia-Pacific cooperation, where China is also part of. It needs to encourage other countries to get to know more about this issue and to have the same position as we are having.
So working together with other countries, for example, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, that’s Japan, India, and Australia, but also with other countries like South Korea or the Holy See, for example, that share the same values and have kind of, like, an important role in Asia can help to secure pressure against China.
W: So raise the issue in an international fora, every one we can find, make it a priority, and do it in conjunction with these kind of allies you mentioned.
C: Yes.
W: Okay. What’s the fifth step?
C: The economic pressure. We need to make companies accountable. They need to uphold human rights standards. We need to halt imports that use forced labor, for example. There are two specific laws that talk about this issue, that’s the Tariffs Act and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. I watched a documentary the other day;
A woman in Oregon found a letter from a prisoner in a forced labor camp in China – northern China – asking for help, telling everything that was happening in this labor camp, and put it on a Halloween decor inside the box that was shipped to the US. And there is a documentary about it. This woman goes to China, meet this prisoner. This prisoner was released, went to Indonesia, but he was found dead.
W: Was what?
C: Found dead, apparently for a health issue, but he knew he was being followed. My point is that we still consume things that are made in forced labor camps or with human rights violations in it, so we need to be aware of this.
W: Okay. What’s the sixth step?
C: And the final step is engagement in public events from government officials. We have the data, we have information, we have testimonies that we can use for hearing conferences to highlight human right violations in China. We can also keep inaugurating monuments and being present in remembrance ceremonies or doing something else in memorial days.
For example, the Victims of Communism Memorial Day, that’s November 7. So we can use this chance to speak about this issue.
W: So you have six steps. You think together, if there was a coordinated strategy, an indirect approach is a more effective way to take on the Communist Party than a direct approach.
C: Yes.
W: We will post Cristina’s essay on our web page, which is humanrights.catholic.edu. The listener can go and read it in its, kind of, entirety and get some of the detail we left out. But it’s something everybody listening should be thinking about. China, it’s the CCP, and the Chinese government is suppressing human rights of its citizens and as well as undermining democracy abroad.
So what does the US do? And every question about what you should do should be judged by, “Will it be effective?” So this essay tries to conceptualize a way to be effective because the direct approach is thought to be unlikely to work, whereas an indirect approach, which is multi-fronts, could work.
So it’s something for everybody to think about and to talk with your representatives in the US government about; your congressman or even your local people, because local communities can take steps against importation of materials that could be tainted by prison labor or something like that. So again, thanks for listening.
Thank you, Cristina, for being on. We’ll see you next time on another edition of The Barefoot Lawyer Reports.
The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The documentary features world-class human rights experts from former state department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.
Read Cristina’s award-winning essay here: https://humanrights.catholic.edu/how-do-you-eat-a-chinese-dragon-one-bite-at-a-time/