Sun 29 May 2022:
NGOs criticized UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet on Saturday for avoiding condemnation of China during her visit there, despite mounting evidence of horrific human rights violations against minorities.
Bachelet said in a final press conference in Guangzhou that she had not come to China to carry out an “investigation” but had been called on by the Chinese government to review its counter-terrorism measures to ensure they met international human rights standards.
She refrained from directly criticizing China in her comments after her trip that included visits to the cities of Kashgar and Urumqi in the north-western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where human rights activists say hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities have been placed in re-education camps.
“The UN rights chief seems to believe she is so persuasive that her quiet backroom conversation will convince Beijing to ease its repression,” said Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch. “But Beijing will gladly talk privately until she is blue in the face. It will respond only to public pressure,” he said in a tweet.
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According to the World Uyghur Congress, which represents exiled Uighur groups, “the visit has turned out to be a propaganda opportunity for China to whitewash its crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uyghur [sic] people.”
Bachelet’s visit was “a catastrophic dereliction of duty,” wrote Luke de Pulford from anti-slavery NGO Arise.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US “remains concerned” about the visit and China’s “efforts to restrict and manipulate” it.
“While we continue to raise our concerns about China’s human rights abuses directly with Beijing and support others who do so, we are concerned the conditions Beijing authorities imposed on the visit did not enable a complete and independent assessment of the human rights environment in [China], including in Xinjiang, where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing,” Blinken said in a statement.
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Blinken also said that Bachelet “should have been allowed confidential meetings with family members of Uyghur and other ethnic minority diaspora communities in Xinjiang who are not in detention facilities but are forbidden from traveling out of the region.
“We also note that the High Commissioner was not allowed access to individuals who were part of the Xinjiang labor transfer program and have been sent to other provinces across China,” he added.
Bachelet spoke with senior officials and gained unsupervised access to members of civil society and religious groups during her six-day trip.
It is the first official trip to China by a human rights commissioner in 17 years and Bachelet’s trip followed extensive exchanges with Beijing. While she was invited to China in 2019, the government was initially reluctant to permit her unsupervised access to the people she wanted to speak to.
Even before and during her trip, there was international scepticism.
Washington had expressed concern that China may stifle her ability to conduct an independent review of the human rights situation.
Bachelet’s visit, according to the Tibet Initiative Germany (TID), could be used for Chinese propaganda.
Her visit coincided with new allegations from a data dump about the scope of persecution and widespread incarceration in Xinjiang.
Uighurs in the region are accused by the Chinese government of encouraging separatism, extremism, and terrorism. Members of the Muslim minority claim that they are oppressed politically, religiously, and culturally.
According to Germany, the data leak revealed “new evidence of very serious human rights violations.”
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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