People's Daily, China's most influential newspaper, started to run a special column on human rights education beginning Jan. 12 to enhance the public's human rights awareness.

Entitled "One hundred Q & A on human rights," the column will discuss 100 topics in the form of questions and answers for 50 weeks in a row. The topics will focus on basic human rights knowledge, China's stance and progress on human rights protection, and international concepts and practices.

The column is run China Society for Human Rights Studies.

An expert with the society said the column is an important part of the nation's efforts to improve human rights education and enable the public to better defend their own rights and not to infringe on those of others.

"It is also an important move for China to fulfill its obligations to the United Nation's project of global human rights education," the expert said.

China has launched a chain of rights protection measures after March 2004 when the country put "the state respects and protects human rights" into its Constitution, a crucial step of placing human rights protection a top issue in the Chinese Communist Party's ruling and administration.

But compared with the progress done on rights protection, the human rights education among the public is still lagging behind. "That's why we will run this column," said the expert.

As a further move this year, the government is considering to provide courses on human rights from elementary schools all the way to universities and to hand out pamphlets of human rights knowledge to local officials.
 
(Xinhua News Agency January 18, 2005)