Cameron and his government have been keen to keep human rights in the background of the visit and set a different tone after he angered Beijing in 2012 by meeting the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.
President Obama promised last year to start a more conciliatory era in United States-China relations, pushing human rights issues to the background, but the new criticism of China's Internet censorship and rising tensions over currency valuation and Taiwan arms sales indicate that animus could flare in the months ahead.
Catherine Gilfedder from Reprieve told me, "We have asked BT to show us what steps it has taken to ensure it is not complicit in these human rights violations, for the background to the contract and BT's precise obligations under it, as well as clarification of the stage of implementation.
"Clearly, the person they put forward, whatever his merits, did not have a very impressive background in human rights," said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at Inter-American Dialogue, a research group in Washington.
Instead, as Mr. Bush prepared to come to the Asian summit meeting in Shanghai this week to rally support for his war on terrorism, human rights issues faded into the background and the high-profile cases seemed once again stalled, family members and their lawyers said.
It would be a reasonable excuse for Nokia if they had sold the monitoring technology to a democratic country for controlling child abuse or other uses, but selling it to the Iranian government with a very clear background of human rights violence and suppression of dissent, it's just inexcusable for me.
Emilio Alvarez, General Secretary of The Inter-American Human Rights CoMexicann, is a Mexican with a formidable background in human rights advocacy.
Most of the people who have come to work in the human rights field have a legal background.
