The “2026 High-Level Forum on Global Human Rights Governance” is set to convene in Beijing on June 11–12, bringing together more than 400 Chinese and international guests from nearly a hundred countries, as well as the United Nations and other international and regional organizations. Before the forum, I visited the National Museum of Slavery in Luanda, Angola — a profound mirror of human civilization’s capacity for self-reflection.
Revisiting history
This building, serving simultaneously as a colonial mansion and a Catholic church, silently bears witness to four centuries of darkness in the transatlantic slave trade. Millions of Africans were stripped of their humanity, trafficked to distant lands, and condemned to lifelong enslavement — all in the name of religious ritual. This history reveals a painful truth: the largest systematic human rights catastrophe in modern history was not born of ignorance or barbarism, but was an institutionalized crime against humanity, engineered through the collusion of religious theology, colonial law, and imperial power. As the Global Human Rights Governance Forum approaches, revisiting this history carries profound and urgent contemporary significance.
Enslaved system
For a long time, religion was regarded as the guardian of fraternity and equality, believed to be a natural protector of human dignity and worth. Yet the history of the colonial era thoroughly overturned this assumption. Western ecclesiastical authorities once issued decrees defining non-Christians as “a group lacking full personhood” — furnishing theological endorsement for the institution of slavery. In Luanda’s slave trade system, baptism was not salvation but rather a “legitimizing ritual” for the deprivation of human rights. Captured Africans were compelled to undergo religious baptism, incorporating them into the colonial system of ownership and completing their transformation from “natural persons” into “privately owned commodities.” What should have been the baseline of conscience became a fig leaf for colonial hegemony — the most profound paradox, and the most bitter warning, in the history of human rights.
Religion as a tool for colonialism
The colonial system entrenched human rights oppression as the norm through layers of institutional design. Portuguese colonial authorities long enforced racial hierarchy and laws of enslavement; even when legislation nominally abolished slavery on multiple occasions, exploitation continued through forced labor and legal constraints on identity. This systematic oppression — waged under the banner of civilization, wielding institutions as its instrument, and draped in the garb of faith — stripped African peoples of their rights to survival, liberty, and development, creating the North-South development divide, civilizational prejudice, and human rights injustice that persist to this day. The debts of history were never automatically cancelled with the fall of the colonial era.
Reshaping contemporary governance
The wounds of history have profoundly shaped the core consensus of contemporary global human rights governance. The governing philosophy advocated at this forum — “protecting human rights through security, promoting human rights through development, and advancing human rights through cooperation” — is precisely a meaningful correction of, and contemporary response to, the legacy of colonial slavery. Modern history has repeatedly demonstrated that human rights narratives divorced from reality, operating on double standards and entrenched in bloc confrontation, are in essence a modern extension of colonial hegemonic thinking. The so-called doctrines of “civilizational superiority” and “human rights preaching” follow the same logic as enslaving other peoples in the name of religion — the costume and the vocabulary have changed, but the underlying drive to dominate has not.
Genuine human rights have never been the exclusive discourse of a handful of nations, nor a tool for interfering in the internal affairs of others — they are a value cherished by all of humanity in common. Human rights are historical, concrete, and evolving; they cannot be discussed in the abstract, divorced from a country’s historical culture and stage of development. The suffering that African nations endured as a result of lost sovereignty and the plundering of their right to development is itself proof that peace and security are the bedrock of human rights, autonomous development is their essence, and equal cooperation is their path forward.
Redefining Contemporary governance
In today’s world, the rise of unilateralism, the politicization of human rights issues, widening development gaps, and intensifying civilizational confrontation mean that global human rights governance still faces profound challenges. Looking back at the historical chains of Luanda, the progress of human civilization is, at its core, a process of continually dispelling the fog of privilege, rejecting the logic of oppression, and defending equal dignity.
Remembering the lessons of colonial slavery is precisely what enables us to move toward a better future. Global human rights governance in the new era must thoroughly abandon colonial thinking and double standards, genuinely respect each country’s independently chosen path of human rights development, and uphold the fundamental principles of equal dialogue, mutual learning, and cooperation for shared benefit. Only by using security to end instability, development to eliminate poverty, and cooperation to break down confrontation, can we gradually resolve the human rights injustices accumulated through history, and together build a new, more equitable, just, and inclusive framework for global human rights governance — one in which the shared human value of dignity and freedom for all truly takes root and endures.
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