UN Legal Office Releases Xinjiang Report on Uyghurs Despite China’s Resistance – National

The office of UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet released its long-awaited report on alleged rights abuses in China’s western region of Xinjiang on Wednesday, brushing aside Beijing’s demands that a report that had fueled a tug-of-war over diplomatic clout with the UN be kept under wraps over West the rights of the region’s native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups.

The report, which Western diplomats and UN officials said was almost ready months ago, was released just minutes before the end of Bachelet’s four-year term. Unexpectedly, the report broke significant new ground on the wide-ranging insights of independent advocacy groups and journalists who have been documenting human rights concerns in Xinjiang for years.

But Bachelet’s report comes with the imprimatur of the United Nations and the member states that make it up. The run-up to his release sparked a debate about China’s influence on the world body and embodied, among other things, the diplomatic coldness between Beijing and the West over human rights.

Hours before the release, China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun said Beijing remained “strongly opposed” to the release.

“We haven’t seen this report yet, but we are totally against such a report, we don’t think it will benefit anyone,” 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 strongly oppose such a report.”

“We all know so well that the so-called Xinjiang issue is a lie entirely fabricated for political motives, and its purpose is definitely to undermine China’s stability and hamper China’s development,” he added.

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Bachelet said in recent months that she has received pressure from both sides to publish – or not to publish – the report and has resisted everything, all the while walking a fine line as she shares her experience of political pressure during her two terms as President of Chile.

In June, Bachelet said she would not seek a new term as rights leader and vowed to publish the report by her August 31 departure date and to governments on both sides of the issue. She hinted last week her office could miss her deadline and said she is “trying” to clear it before she exits.

Bachelet had her sights set on Xinjiang after taking office in September 2018, but Western diplomats have privately expressed concern that she has not challenged China enough during her tenure, when other human rights monitors have cited abuses against Muslim Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang.

Over the past five years, the Chinese government’s mass incarceration campaign in Xinjiang has flushed an estimated one million Uyghurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps that Beijing has dubbed “training centers” but former detainees have described as brutal detention centers.

Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands continue to languish in jail on vague, secret charges.

Some countries, including the United States, have accused Beijing of committing genocide in Xinjiang.