This article originally appeared in The Hamilton Spectator.
By David Matas, Sarah Teich and Isabelle Terranova, June 8, 2026
In a recent interview, Chinese Ambassador to Canada Wang Di said Canada needs to lift its sanctions on Chinese officials before Beijing will consider removing its measures against Canadians.
“The knot has to be untied by the one who tied it,” he said.
It is a tidy metaphor, and it rests on a fundamentally false premise. The two sets of sanctions are not equivalent.
In December 2024, the Government of Canada imposed sanctions on eight current and former senior Chinese officials for their roles in the gross and systematic repression of Uyghurs, Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners.
Twelve days later, Beijing sanctioned the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, the Canada Tibet Committee and 20 individuals associated with those organizations, including two of the three authors of this commentary.
The official Chinese government document describing these measures calls them “countermeasures” under the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, a statute designed “to preserve national sovereignty” against foreign interference.
Article 3 of China’s Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law notes that the PRC “opposes any country’s interference in China’s internal affairs” and that they have “the right to employ corresponding countermeasures.”
From Beijing’s perspective, Canada’s decision to sanction officials complicit in the crimes against humanity against millions of people constitutes foreign interference — and those of us who contributed to that policy, even indirectly, are legitimate targets of retaliation.
The Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law authorizes the state to sanction any person or organization that directly or indirectly participates “in the drafting, decision-making, or implementation” of foreign measures.
Canada sanctioned perpetrators of atrocity. China sanctioned people who talked about it. The ambassador would have us treat these as interchangeable.
This it is one of the oldest plays in the authoritarian handbook.
Redefine human rights advocacy as foreign interference, to make the act of documenting abuse seem like the provocation rather than the abuse itself. Russia does this, as does Iran, Eritrea and countless other dictatorships for whom human rights advocacy threatens their power and survival.
Autocrats often direct this logic not only at foreign critics but at their own citizens who dare to speak.
Canada’s federal inquiry into foreign interference has concluded, and we are waiting for the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act to become enforceable, as well as the establishment of the promised commissioner’s office.
We are trying, as a country, to draw a line between legitimate international engagement and illegitimate manipulation. Ambassador Wang Di’s demand, that Canada undo its human rights sanctions as a precondition for the safety of Canadian civil society, provides an unexpectedly clarifying test case for where that line should fall.
Any credible definition of foreign interference needs to make clear that protesting against gross violations of human rights abroad is not foreign interference in that country’s internal affairs.
The Chinese government accepts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights articulated in that declaration do not stop at national borders, and the people who insist on their enforcement are doing precisely what the international human rights framework was built to enable.
That work becomes more important, not less, when it cannot be done locally, and in China, anyone who promotes respect for human rights becomes a human rights victim.
Canada should state plainly that sanctioning gross human rights violators abroad is not foreign interference and will not be treated as negotiable.
It should affirm that it welcomes the participation of civil society in developing human rights sanctions, and that it will not abandon the Canadians targeted by authoritarian governments for contributing to that process.
And it should recognize that when a government eliminates every domestic avenue for human rights promotion, the case for foreign engagement becomes stronger not weaker.
There is no knot. There is a set of sanctions against human rights violators, and a set of retaliatory measures against the people who helped make those sanctions possible.
One is accountability, the other is intimidation. Canada should not confuse the two.
David Matas is co-founder of Human Rights Action Group and legal advisor to Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project and Canada Tibet Committee.
Isabelle Terranova is an articling student at Human Rights Action Group and a licensed lawyer in Washington, D.C.
Sarah Teich is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
