HAMBURG, May 28: The European Union urged China on Monday to further open its markets to help redress a “huge” trade surplus with the bloc and called on it to ratify a key rights covenant.
EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said after meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi she had also stressed the need for action by Beijing to tackle climate change.
“I mentioned the huge trade deficit that is there,” she told Reuters. “If you only think, in the year 2006 -- 130 billion euros. That's a huge deficit and, therefore, we really want to get market access. I really mentioned this.” Yang declined to comment after the meeting in the German city of Hamburg before heading for further talks with EU ministers.
Ferrero-Waldner said Yang had brought up the issue of an EU arms embargo China wants lifted, after which she had stressed the need for China to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
“That certainly should be ratified and there, of course, you have all the different rights that are very important,” she said when asked if she had raised EU concerns about labour rights standards in China that many Europeans see as a threat to European jobs.
The European Union has imposed an embargo on arms sales to China since the bloody suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and made lifting it conditional on progress on human rights.
However, France has been a leading proponent of ending the embargo, despite strong opposition from the United States.
The meetings come ahead of broader talks between EU and Asian countries in Hamburg, at which the EU side is expected to stress the labour rights.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Europe sought fair competition.
“Asia is a region of tremendous economic dynamism, from which German and European business also benefit greatly,” he told the Hamburger Abendblatt on the eve of the meetings.
“But I also want our competition to be fair ... this means we cannot have jobs being shifted from Europe to Asia simply because we insist on high environmental and social standards here, which are not respected in other parts of the world.”—Reuters
