Business and Human Rights

A recent Legal Daily article illustrates how the practice of "individual case supervision" offers litigants an extralegal method of influencing how courts decide cases. Individual case supervision permits local people’s congresses (LPCs) to intervene in and review court cases.

According to the article, a contract dispute between an electrical tools factory in Zhejiang province and an import company in Jiangsu province erupted into a series of lawsuits over product quality. Each party filed cases in their home jurisdiction. An effort by the factory owner to negotiate a settlement in person resulted in his arrest. A Jiangsu court subsequently sentenced him to a prison term for selling inferior products.

On January 7, China’s Ministry of Agriculture released a new regulation on transfers of farmland that has been contracted to individual farmers by village collectives. The right to transfer contracted land was established in Article 32 and related provisions of the 2002 PRC Rural Land Contracting Law. The new regulation, entitled Measures on the Administration of Transfers of Rural Land Contract Rights, tracks these provisions, confirming the right to transfer contracted land without interference and providing detailed guidelines on the permitted forms for transfers, transfer procedures, and other matters. Among the regulation’s 35 articles are provisions dealing with the following:

According to an article in the Guangming Daily (in Chinese), Wang Xiaoye, a China Academy of Social Sciences Legal Institute Fellow and Vice President of the Economic Legal Association, said recently that the latest draft of the Antimonopoly Law has stronger and more specific provisions proscribing administrative monopoly. Administrative monopoly occurs in the state owned sector when a government bureau or state owned enterprise (SOE) takes advantage of its position to prevent market entry or competition or even drives another company from the market. (In the example given in the article, the bureau with authority over wedding licenses only accepts photos for the licenses from a single local supplier.)

WORLD TRADEORGANIZATION

WT/COMTD/LDC/W/3620 October 2004
(04-4434)

Sub-Committee on Least-Developed Countries Original: English



MARKET ACCESS FOR LEAST-DEVELOPED COUNTRIES IN THE TEXTILES AND CLOTHING SECTOR AFTER THE EXPIRY OF ATC

Initial Submission from the Least-Developed Countries


The following communication, dated 18 October 2004, is being circulated at the request of the Delegation of Tanzania on behalf of the least developed countries.

_______________


1. International trade in Textiles and Clothing is to be integrated into the normal rules and disciplines of the GATT/WTO from the beginning of 2005. This will bring an end to a quota system that prevailed almost half a century, and heavily influenced the pattern of trade in Textiles and Clothing.

An article originally carried in the China Youth Daily illustrates the links between local government and corporate interests in China, particularly at local levels. The article details the extent to which current government and Party officials hold key positions in the largest state-owned enterprise (SOE) of Jingbian county (in northern Shaanxi province) in violation of national rules.

The general manager of the corporation, an oil drilling and exploration corporation, is concurrently the deputy county head. The assistant Party secretary of the county disciplinary committee serves as the SOE's assistant manager. Approximately 50 other government officials also hold positions in the company and receive both government salaries and private compensation.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce has announced new textile export limitations (in Chinese) that it says will help to maximize the potential future development of the textile industry. Presumably MOFCOM is seeking to head off the imposition of significant safeguards against its textile industry, which is predicted to take the developed world's textile and apparel markets by storm when global textile quotas end on January 1. China's textile industry can still face quantitative limits because it agreed to allow other WTO members to assert a textile safeguard against Chinese textile exporters.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao discussed the exchange rate value of the yuan December 8 during meetings with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Wen’s December 8 comments clarified that interim changes will first create "a managed floating exchange rate" that "can be controlled and is variable" before moving to the eventual free float that Chinese policymakers have long cited as the final goal of China’s exchange rate policy. This announcement will likely lead to further speculation in China’s currency, which is currently valued at 8.28 yuan to the U.S. dollar. Premier Wen’s words, however, leave unspecified the time frame during which his government plans to complete the gradual changes discussed with Mr. Schroeder, or a target date for the eventual free float of the yuan.

At a Forum on the Third Anniversary of the Revision of the Copyright Law, scholars, government officials, and rightsholders asserted the need for further development of copyright law and regulation due to the changing situation.

While some of the changes under discussion are new regulations that will provide methods of protecting copyrights that will benefit both foreign and domestic rightholders, some of the proposed regulations touch on areas of great sensitivity in the international intellectual property community. Regulations currently under review by the State Council’s Legislative Affairs Office include the Folk Culture and Arts Protection Regulations, the Consolidated Copyright Management Regulations, the Information Network Dissemination Rights Protection Regulations, and the Broadcast Organic Statutory Licensing Fees Measures.