In a sign that China might be serious about trying to improve its human rights record, the communist government has agreed to invite U.N. investigators to study issues of torture, religious freedom and arbitrary detention, an American envoy said.
Officials also promised to invite leaders of a U.S. government-financed commission on religious freedom, Assistant Secretary of State Lorne Craner said after two days of human rights talks.
No dates were set, but Craner said officials told him invitations to the U.N. investigators would be issued immediately and with no conditions attached.
"You usually don't invite those people unless you're serious about addressing the issues they will raise," Craner told The Associated Press late Tuesday.
China had promised earlier this year to arrange a visit by the U.N. torture investigator. But the U.N. human rights commissioner, Mary Robinson, said the Beijing government had not agreed to U.N. demands that he be allowed to visit prisons of his choice and talk in private with inmates.
"What is important about this renewed invitation is that it is unconditional," said Craner, the U.S. State Department's top human rights official.
The talks this week were part of a periodic series of human rights contacts carried out since the mid-1990s between Beijing and the United States, the European Union and other governments.
China usually rejects scrutiny of its human rights record as interference in its affairs. But the communist government has begun in recent years to acknowledge a need for change — though on Chinese terms — and to accept foreign technical advice on improving its courts and some other institutions, which includes guidance aimed at improving respect for human rights.
Craner's announcement was an unusually public result from a process that activists complain produces little progress — and few details from the foreign governments involved.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said Tuesday that the talks "enhanced understanding" between Beijing and Washington. But Liu gave no details and didn't mention any promise of visits by U.N. inspectors.
Craner also delivered a speech Tuesday to students at a university in Beijing where he applauded China's experiments with a system of nonpartisan, village-level elections and called for expanded democratic rights for the Chinese public.
"There is nothing incompatible between Chinese culture ... and basic human impulses for rights, freedom and democracy," he said in the speech, a copy of which was released Wednesday by the U.S. Embassy.
In his meetings, Craner said he brought up concerns about several imprisoned dissidents and stressed Washington's insistence on respect for human rights in the U.S.-led global anti-terrorism campaign.
China has been accused of using the campaign to crush nonviolent pro-independence sentiment in Tibet and the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang.
"We told them that you have to be very discriminating on these issues, and they said, `We are,'" Craner said.
He was due to fly Wednesday to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and deliver a speech on human rights and the anti-terrorism campaign.
This year, Washington added a Xinjiang independence group cited by Beijing to its list of terrorist organizations. That was a victory for the communist government, which has tried to link Uighur militants to international Muslim extremism.