China’s treatment of Uyghurs may be crime against humanity, says UN human rights chief

The Chinese government has committed “serious human rights violations” in its treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, according to the UN high commissioner for human rights.

In a long-anticipated report that was opposed by Beijing, the UN body said there was credible evidence that Uyghurs imprisoned in detention camps had been victims of torture and sexual and gender-based violence.

“The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups ... may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity,” the report said.

The report was the first investigation by the UN organisation into abuses in the north-western region of Xinjiang, where more than one million Uyghurs and other minorities have been subjected to mass internments and forced labour. It was released on the day that Michelle Bachelet, the UN human rights chief who visited Xinjiang this year, ended her tenure.

Since 2017, China significantly expanded police control over Xinjiang’s Muslim population of about 13mn, describing the measures as “anti-terrorist”.

Beijing’s permanent mission to the UN said the report was “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces” and “wantonly smears and slanders China”.

The UN simultaneously released a 121-page report by China, which said the state’s fight against terrorism in the region was “necessary and just”, within “the rule of law” and “safeguards human rights”.

However, the UN said the abuses resulted from an anti-terrorism system that was “deeply problematic” from the perspective of human rights.

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The anti-terrorism apparatus had led to the “large-scale arbitrary deprivation of liberty” of Uyghurs and other minorities in “vocational education and training centres” between at least 2017 and 2019, the UN said.

“Even if the VETC system has since been reduced in scope, as the government has claimed, the laws and policies that underpin it remain in place,” the UN concluded.

The report noted that the detention system was part of a backdrop of broader discrimination against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. This included restrictions on religious identity and expression in addition to “serious indications of violations of reproductive rights through the coercive and discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies”.

The report’s release followed allegations of genocide against Beijing by the US, UK, Canada and others, as well as consumer boycotts. In June, the US started blocking imports of goods with components from Xinjiang, which is a big producer of cotton and polysilicon for solar panels.

“The high commissioner’s damning findings explain why the Chinese government fought tooth and nail to prevent the publication of her Xinjiang report, which lays bare China’s sweeping rights abuses,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.

Ms Richardson called on the UN Human Rights Council to initiate a “comprehensive investigation into the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity” and hold those responsible to account.

The potential next step for the UN would be to start a formal investigation of abuses in Xinjiang, which governments including the UK have called for.

Ahead of the report’s release, the Chinese foreign ministry said the investigation was a “pure stunt orchestrated by the US and a handful of other western countries”. Washington and Beijing are in talks about a possible meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden this year.

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Western officials and human rights groups have also criticised the UN for repeated delays in releasing the report, arguing that the lag damaged the integrity of the organisation in dealing with China.

Ms Bachelet had hoped to publish the report almost a year ago, but Beijing lobbied to suppress it. The final delay was in order to handle further submissions from China, she said. “I have been under tremendous pressure to publish or not to publish, but I will not publish or withhold publication due to any such pressure,” Ms Bachelet told reporters in Geneva last week.

In a tightly controlled mission in late May, Ms Bachelet spent two days in Xinjiang and spoke with MR Xi and foreign minister Wang Yi, among other senior officials. However, the former Chilean president did not meet families of detained Uyghur Muslims, a decision that drew further scorn from rights activists.

The UN special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, Tomoya Obokata, issued a report last month that concluded that forced labour was occurring in Xinjiang through the VETC and a system of labour transfers into the rest of China. Special rapporteurs are independent UN-appointed experts.

David Kaye, a former UN special rapporteur on freedom of speech, said the delay in the report’s release was “damning and deserves a full accounting”. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022