Does Northel Networks Corporation respect human rights?

domenica, 27 marzo 2005

Does Northel Networks Corporation respect human rights?

As a part of its tenth Five-Year Plan for economic development, China is building a railway to link the northern city of Gormo to the capital of Tibet, Lhasa. The project will connect for the very first time Tibet with the Chinese nationwide railway grid. According to Students For A Free Tibet, this Gormo-Lhasa (the world's highest rail service) is part of China's plan known as "Western Development Campaign" and, as the previous railways built in Mongolia and East Turkestan, is meant to speed colonization of the area. Apart from being very expensive, the project -continues Students For A Free Tibet- will cause serious environmental destruction and has no particular benefits for Tibetans. Just a few words are enough: among the 38.000 who are working to build the Gormo-Lhasa line, only 6.000 are Tibetans and most of them earn up to eleven times less than the other employees, who are mostly from China. I suggest yor reading of the whole report by the International Campaign fot Tibet. It removes any doubt.
As Jam Yang wrote on Yahoo! Group "Chinese Internet Research", Canadian firm Nortel Networks Corp. said a few weeks ago that Chinese Railways Ministry has chosen it to provide a digital wireless communications network on the Gormo-Lhasa railway. The decision followed a year-long trial of Nortel's GSM-R (Global System for Mobile Communication) for Railways technology in China at altitudes of up to 15,700 feet above sea level, as Nortel specified in a statement some days ago.
The fact is: many human rights activists are now worried Nortel could be helping China to swamp Tibetan culture, giving Chinese the possibility to realize their railway and their (hidden) goal to assimilate Tibet. Obviously, Marion MacKenzie, vice-president of corporate communications at Nortel, categorically rejected that the Canadian firm could be involved in repressing and stifling human rights and freedom of any individual.

But there's more to say. Jam Yang, in another message to "Chinese Internet Research", wrote that Nortel-China Customs deployment will support the state-owned Golden Customs initiative, a nationwide project developed to connect the information networks of the customs and foreign trade sectors.
Nortel has also supplied Golden Taxation, a national information network linking state taxation headquarters with local taxation offices at all levels. Authorities told that Nortel Solutions will protect China Customs Business Critical Information: according to them, Nortel's Optical Metro DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) technology will enable "secure, reliable, real-time data storage".
But this tecnology seems not to respect data protection: in particular, UK human rights organization (The Omega Foundation) recommended respect in using personal data and the establishment of a specific legislation to protect citizens. But I think China is not worried about.
And Nortel Networks makes its business...