You’re listening to part one of an interview with the third place winner of the Catholic University Center for Human Rights Annual Human rights essay contest by William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. To read the award winning essays, go to humanrights.catholic.edu

 

Bill Saunders: Today I want to welcome Father Ambrose to the Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China podcast. Father Ambrose is a student in my Master of Arts in Human Rights program, and anybody who is listening and interested in the Master of Arts program can go to the website of the Center for Human Right and find information. You’ll find tabs there where you can learn more about this Master of Arts in Human Rights from the Catholic Perspective, the program in which Father Ambrose is involved in.  Father Ambrose is a priest from Nigeria who has spent one year with us and has a second year coming up. Welcome to the podcast Father.

 

Fr. Ambrose Ekeroku: Thank you very much, Professor Saunders. 

 

Bill Saunders: As I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, the Center for Human Rights sponsors an essay contest looking at human rights issues connected with China. There are many reasons for that. Our distinguished fellow at the center is Chen Guangcheng, the famous Barefoot Lawyer who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2012 who now works with us here in Washington D.C. At our center, he has taught a class to Father Ambrose and other students in the program. Because of him, we have an essay contest that looks at human rights in China. Most people listening will know the issues on human rights in China are not limited just to China, as China is such a powerful country and is committed to spreading its anti-human rights views in the US and everywhere else. 

It’s a threat to true human rights, and we wanted people to take a look at it. Father Ambrose wrote an essay for us, and it was one of the prize winning essays, and it’s called “Technology Censorship of Religious Groups in China”. Father, I’ll turn it over to you. Tell us what you wrote about in this paper, and then we can be more specific on anything we need to.

 

Fr. Ambrose Ekeroku: Thank you very much, Professor Saunders, for all of you at the Center for Religious Freedom. I was actually motivated by Ambassador Sam Brownback when he taught us the class. In addition, having met Cheng Guangcheng and reading his book, The Barefoot Lawyer, I’ve heard about all the different ways that China as a country is stifling religious freedom in that country. However, I took a class taught by Ambassador Sam Brownback on International Religious Liberty at CUA, he opened my eyes to the modern ways that religious freedom is being restricted and censored in China. I saw this opportunity for an essay context, even though it was a little bit tight for us in the semester. I decided to plumb a little deeper into the issue of the Chinese Communist Party censoring religious groups in China. This is why I brainstormed this topic, technology censorship of religious groups in China; and in that case, I just wanted to expose the different tools utilized by the Chinese Communist Party to censor and restrict religious freedom in China.

 

For those who may not understand what technology censorship is all about, it’s the issue of using technology by a government to control and limit the ability of an individual or group to access information. The government sees the allowing of religious groups to exist in the country as a way of destabilizing their mode of government, the totalitarian system of government. They want to promote only Confucianism, which they look at as the only and official religion that should be uncontrolled. Any other religious groups have to be controlled or restricted. Because religion is so dear to the heart and soul of man – it’s the human rights of the soul – it’s not so easy to actually restrict people from worshiping God the way they want. Since the CCP has not been so successful at restricting people from worshiping the way they would like to, they now employ the use of technology to monitor people, specifically with filtering and regulating the Internet. 

 

Internet content such as access to content, to information, to materials that could help people to worship is restricted, because of the technological advancements that they have put in place. This violates people’s religious rights, specifically the right to worship the way they want because it is a very cheap and easy way to restrict and monitor people. The government filtering can easily disrupt the way that people communicate and present ideas. It is a very effective way of controlling information and it is relatively hard to detect. It can restrict a large quantity of materials in a very short time. Unlike the physical surveillance of physical materials, this is quite faster and more efficient because it gathers large amounts of  information. To counter the restrictions, some Chinese people use covert means of assessing the Internet via VPNs.

 

For context, it might look like something that is being made up; yet, the surveillance and censorship have been there since 2005. I remember when the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited China, there were over 20 websites that the Chinese government shut down, including websites where Chinese citizens could read the Bible for themselves, both in Chinese or English. That was the way that the CCP are controlling the means through which they regulate and control the Internet for people not to access religious materials, but the people try to circumvent that through VPNs, which allows people to access the Internet without being noticed. Unfortunately, the Chinese government also began to partner with technological industries, the smartphone production companies that have become commonplace amongst the citizens, so that the CCP would know if VPNs were being used to access some materials that the government was restricting.

 

That made the situation more complex. Afterward, the CCP promoted policy to influence the technological companies to include some new facilities in the phones and even computers, such as forcing devices that access the Internet to be activated through the government system that will be able to detect or prevent it from using VPN. It was an effective tool and comprehensive  takeover or control of anything that could be assessed online by the citizenry. In my essay, I tried to expose this, despite the time constraints we had as students. 

 

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