Tue 13 October 2020:
China, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Nepal and Uzbekistan are among the candidates vying for four seats on the UN human rights council on Tuesday.
China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are poised to join the United Nations Human Rights Council, raising alarm among rights groups who say the countries are among the world’s “worst rights violators”.
If the countries get elected, the move is bound to leave human right campaigners in the countries aghast and they might plead to European Union States as a last resort.
“Electing these dictatorships as UN judges on human rights is like making a gang of arsonists into the fire brigade,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, an independent human rights group based in Geneva, said in a statement.
“Serial rights abusers should not be rewarded with seats on the Human Rights Council,” said Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Saudi Arabia was previously on the council until 2019. China, which is under fire over its treatment of ethnic Uighurs in the far western region of Xinjiang and its imposition of a National Security Law in Hong Kong, could also return as a member.
HRW said both countries had a history of using their seats in the council “to prevent scrutiny of their abuses and those by their allies.”
“It’s not good for human rights or for the rights council when the worst rights violators get elected,” Charbonneau said.
Only last month, dozens of nations condemned Saudi Arabia before the council over serious rights violations and demanded accountability for the murder Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post newspaper columnist who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
The council also alleged other serious rights violations in Saudi Arabia, including reports of torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances and HRW noted the Saudi-led coalition also continues to commit war crimes against civilians in Yemen.
Xinjiang camps
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine earlier this month, exiled Saudi national Taha al-Hajji expressed his opposition to the country’s re-election.
China has been under fire over its policies in Xinjiang where the United Nations says some one million Uighurs are being held in camps that China has said are “vocational skills training centres”. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, has repeatedly asked China – without success – for free access to Xinjiang.
A group of 39 countries, led by Germany, signed a statement last week expressing “grave concern” at the situation in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
Russia vs Ukraine
Other countries vying for the four seats available to the Asia Pacific region are Nepal, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan, while Russia and Ukraine are competing for one of the two Eastern European seats.
“The presence of abusers on the Council undermines the Council’s legitimacy and contradicts its own charter,” UN Watch said in an official protest to the UN against the candidacy of countries including Saudi Arabia, China and Russia.
It noted Russia’s activities in Syria and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as its attempts to stifle domestic opposition and curb media freedom among other human rights violations.
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