Minutes before the end of her term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Chilean Michelle Bachelet fulfilled her promise and published a long-awaited report in which she maintains that China could commit crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
Throughout its almost 50 pages, the document does not mention the word "genocide", a term that has been applied in the past by governments such as the United States or various international organizations to refer to the humanitarian situation in the controversial Chinese region. Still, the agency accuses the Asian country of committing "serious human rights violations" against these minorities, whom Beijing perceives as a threat to its national security.
The text, the result of an independent investigation, maintains that Beijing used its vague anti-terrorist legislation to carry out a campaign of "large-scale deprivation of liberty" of these minorities, at least between 2017 and 2019.
The reasons for a person to end up locked up could be as strange as the fact of wearing a veil or a long beard, suddenly quitting drinking alcohol or smoking, or installing instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp on the mobile. "The legal texts seem to combine issues of personal choice linked to religious practices with extremism, and extremism with the phenomenon of terrorism," the report collects.
The story maintains that it considers credible the allegations that torture was practiced in detention centers, which in some cases included forced medical treatment or "the forced application of family planning and birth control programs," although it acknowledges that it cannot draw definitive conclusions about the extent of these abuses. Repressive policies also include the separation of families and the interruption of contacts with other people.
The investigation does not offer concrete figures on the number of individuals who have passed through the detention camps, the existence of which Beijing initially denied before calling them "vocational education and training centers". According to past estimates, up to a million people could have been hospitalized for periods ranging from two to 18 months. China maintains that these centers are already closed and their inmates “graduated”, a claim that has not been independently corroborated.
As a climax, Bachelet's office asks Beijing to release people arbitrarily detained in the region, to clarify the whereabouts of those who are wanted by their relatives, review anti-terrorist legislation and investigate cases of destruction of Muslim mosques and cemeteries.
After months of delays, the report was published just over ten minutes before Bachelet's last official day as High Commissioner for Human Rights ended in Geneva. The Chilean recognized last week that during all this time it has received strong pressure both from those in favor of publishing the report as soon as possible and from those who wanted to bury it, with China in the lead.
Bachelet announced she would not seek a second term as high commissioner just weeks after her controversial May trip to China. Her expedition was highly criticized by civil society organizations, who considered that she had been too complacent with Beijing and had not taken the opportunity to forcefully denounce the abuses against the Uyghurs and other discriminated groups.
On this occasion, these same actors were satisfied with the publication of the report. “Despite strong denials from the Chinese government, the UN has officially acknowledged that horrible crimes are taking place,” Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, said after its publication. The document "exposes the scale and severity of human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
Quite different was the reaction of Beijing. From Geneva, the Chinese mission to the UN criticized a report that it considers "based on disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-Chinese forces."
In his opinion, the document "distorts" its laws and policies, slanders "for no reason", interferes in its internal affairs and ignores "the human rights achievements made by people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang and the devastating damage caused by terrorism." and extremism."
