China’s discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups in the western region of Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity, the UN human rights office has said in a damning report.
The UN, in its long-awaited 48-page report, calls for an urgent international response over allegations of torture and other rights violations in Beijing’s campaign to root out terrorism.
It says “serious human rights violations” have been committed in Xinjiang and cites “patterns of torture” inside what Beijing describes vocational centres. And it warns that the “arbitrary and discriminatory detention” of such groups in Xinjiang, through moves that stripped them of “fundamental rights may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said the report lays bare “China’s sweeping rights abuse”, and urged the Human Rights Council, whose next session is in September, to investigate the allegations and hold those responsible to account.
China’s policy to fight terrorism and extremism singled out Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim communities, between 2017 and 2019.
The report, which western diplomats and UN officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes before UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet came to the end of her four-year term.
Hours before it was released, China’s UN ambassador Zhang Jun said Beijing remained “firmly opposed” to the publication of the report.
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“We haven’t seen this report yet, but we are completely opposed to such a report, we do not think it will produce any good to anyone,” Mr Zhang told reporters outside the Security Council.
“We have made it very clear to the high commissioner and on a number of other occasions that we are firmly opposed to such a report.”
Ms Bachelet said in recent months that she received pressure from both sides to publish – or not publish – the report and resisted it all, treading a fine line all the while noting her experience with political squeeze during her two terms as president of Chile.
In the past five years, the Chinese government’s mass detention campaign in Xinjiang put an estimated million Uighurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps, which Beijing called “training centres” but former detainees described as brutal detention centres.
Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands remain in prison on vague, secret charges.
Some countries, including the United States, have accused Beijing of committing genocide in Xinjiang
- With agencies