The United States said Thursday that a much-anticipated UN report confirmed US views that China was committing genocide against the Uyghur people, while Beijing angrily labels the world organization an accomplice of the West.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres defended the report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on the western region of Xinjiang and urged China to follow the recommendations in the text to end “discriminatory” practices against Uyghurs and others, mainly Muslims.
The landmark report – released minutes before UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet left office – described a series of human rights violations, including torture, forced labor and arbitrary detention, attaching the UN seal to many of the accusations long ago by activist groups, Western , were voiced. nations and the Uyghur community in exile.
The report points out that China may have committed “crimes against humanity”, but it did not go so far as to call Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs “genocide”, a term used by the United States since January 2021 and since then. has been adopted by legislators in several countries, other western countries.
However, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the contents of the report “express our grave concern at the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity committed by officials of the PRC [República Popular da China] committing against the Uyghurs”.
“We will continue to hold the PRC accountable and ask the PRC to unjustly release detainees, account for the missing and allow independent investigators full and unrestricted access to Xinjiang, Tibet and the entire PRC,” Blinken said in a statement. , using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
Beijing has sharply rejected the report, which has been in the works for more than a year, and has strongly opposed its release, sharing a more than 100-page document from the Xinjiang provincial government defending its policies.
“The so-called critical report you mentioned was first-hand planned and produced by the US and some Western troops, it is totally illegal and invalid,” State Department spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a briefing on Thursday. .
“The report is a hodgepodge of misinformation and is a political tool that serves as part of the West’s strategy to use Xinjiang to control China,” he added.
‘Politicalisation’ of UN work
Bachelet, who has been heavily criticized by the US for visiting China in May and not immediately releasing the report, said she decided a thorough assessment of the situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) was needed.
The former Chilean president was determined to release the document before her four-year term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expired at the end of August — and she did so at 13 minutes before midnight in Geneva. “I said I would publish it before the end of my term and I did,” Bachelet said in an email to AFP on Thursday.
“The politicization of these serious human rights issues by some states has not helped.”
Guterres was “concerned” by what he read in the report, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
“The Secretary-General strongly hopes that the government of China will take into account the recommendations in the HCHR assessment,” added the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
China has been accused for years of detaining more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in the region. Beijing has vehemently rejected the allegations, insisting it runs vocational education centers aimed at curbing Islamic extremism.
“Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and unfavorable detention conditions, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence,” the report said.
The UN Human Rights Office could not confirm how many people were affected by the centers, but concluded that the system worked “widely” across the region.
Activists also accused China of forcibly sterilizing women, and the report cited “credible evidence of reproductive rights violations through the coercive enforcement of family planning policies.”
‘A turning point’
Activist groups said the report should serve as a launch pad for future action.
Human Rights Watch’s China director Sophie Richardson said the “condemnable” findings of widespread human rights violations show why Beijing “fought tooth and nail” to prevent the publication of this report.
Reactions from the Uyghur activist community have been mixed, with some groups praising the report while others wishing it had gone further in its condemnation.
The executive director of the Uyghur human rights project, Omer Kanat, called the report “a turning point” for the international response to the Uyghur situation, but Salih Hudayar, an American Uyghur campaigning for Xinjiang’s independence, noted that the document does not word “genocide”.
Source: DN
