The 2026 China-Europe Seminar on Human Rights was held on Thursday in Paris, gathering more than 150 officials and human rights scholars from China and European countries.
The seminar addressed key topics including human rights challenges, countries' respective responsibilities, the historical value and modern development of human rights concepts, fraternity, international solidarity, and a community with a shared future for humanity.
Dominique Barjot, permanent secretary at the Academy of Overseas Sciences of France and professor emeritus at Sorbonne University, said Europe, China and the Global South can seek common ground together and promote globally sustainable and well-supported development pathways through new progress in multilateralism. He also emphasized the importance of dialogue between nations.
"The important thing is obviously that there be dialogue between nations. In my remarks, I stressed the dimension of multilateralism, which must be preserved at all costs. Before trying to define preconceived principles, we must first get to know each other, learn to understand the mechanisms that have led to a certain conception of democracy and human rights, without having a preconceived notion of grand principles that we want to impose on others at all costs," he said.
Adrian Severin, the former Romanian minister of foreign affairs, warned against the instrumentalization of human rights and their use as a means of ensuring domination by certain countries.
"We see a certain tendency, not only to instrumentalize human rights, but also to ideologize and moralize international relations, which reveals a certain superiority complex that we Europeans, or we Euro-Atlanticists have," Severin said.
Philippe Juvin, a member of the National Assembly of France, said human rights cannot be dissociated from economic realities.
"The emergence of a middle class is a driving factor in the development of human rights. The more a country develops, the more it needs rules that are stable. One cannot imagine prosperity, for example, without a functioning legal system. When you enter into a contract between two people, you need a rule of law that guarantees that the contract you are going to carry out will be fulfilled under the conditions you set. There is this intimate relationship between the development of the rule of law and economic development. Moreover, the two feed off each other," he said.
First held in 2015, the China-Europe Seminar on Human Rights is a platform for in-depth exchanges and cooperation on human rights development between China and Europe.
Chinese, European scholars discuss human rights challenges, development in Paris
