Former McMaster Confucius Institute Teacher Files Case with HR Tribunal

A stipulation on CI's main website says teachers must have 'no record of participation in Falun Gong

“The respondent (McMaster) cannot evade its responsibility to respect the Ontario Human Rights Code standards by delegating its hiring responsibilities to an agent outside the jurisdiction and turning a blind eye to discriminatory hiring practices of its hiring agent,” Matas wrote in a submission to the OHRT, obtained by The Epoch Times.

CSIS head Richard Fadden has said CIs are under the control of Chinese embassies and consulates.

McMaster has also argued that it was unaware of Hanban’s rule forbidding practitioners of Falun Gong from teaching. Matas says the instruction is found in English on Hanban’s website and that McMaster should have known—if they didn’t it means they “didn’t do their homework.”

McMaster did not respond to requests for comment.

Other Canadian schools also claimed to be unaware of CIs’ discriminatory hiring policy, although the statement relating to Falun Gong has been available on the Hanban website.

More at the Epoch Times

Why the fuss over Confucius Institutes?

Some say Beijing-funded language and culture schools fly in the face of academic freedom

 By Alex Ballingall

Then, in 2011, as the Globe and Mail reported recently, a teacher dispatched from China to teach at the Confucius Institute at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. quit her post and filed for refugee status. The newspaper reported that the teacher, a follower of China’s repressed Falun Gong movement named Sonia Zhao, was unable to express her political or religious beliefs as a Confucius Institute teacher—it was prohibited in her job contract, which outlaws teachers with Falun Gong affiliations. In her formal complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, Zhao accused McMaster of “giving legitimization to discrimination.”

It’s hardly the first time Confucius Institutes—of which there more than 320 worldwide—have been cast in an unfavourable light. Funded by Hanban, a branch of China’s education ministry, the institutes have been framed as propaganda tools that export Beijing’s tightly controlled worldview for international consumption, limiting student discussion of Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the status of ethnic and religious minorities in China. Last summer, human rights lawyer Clive Ansley told the Epoch Times that Confucius Institutes, in banning teachers with ties to the Falun Gong, are breaking “all human rights codes in Canada.”

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