Germany takes initiative as 39 UN members pan China over Xinjiang & Tibet; US & UK join in

More trouble and embarrassment are on their way towards China over its widespread human rights violations especially in Xinjiang and Tibet against ethnic and religious minorities. 

A cross-regional group of 39 United Nations member countries issued a stinging public rebuke on Tuesday on the Chinese Communist Party's nefarious policies in the two so-called autonomous regions and expressed grave concern at the impact of its new national security law on human rights in Hong Kong.

The United States, Japan, many European countries, and others called on China to allow ''unfettered access'' to Xinjiang for independent observers including UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet and to urgently refrain from detaining Uighurs and members of other minorities.

The 39 countries also urged China in a joint statement read at a meeting of the General Assembly's human rights committee, to ''uphold autonomy, rights, and freedoms in Hong Kong, and to respect the independence of the Hong Kong judiciary.''

“We are gravely concerned about the human rights situation in Xinjiang and the recent developments in Hong Kong,” German Ambassador Christoph Heusgen said in a statement on behalf of the group to the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee. “We call on China to respect human rights.”

Supporters of the Germany-led statement includes Britain, Canada, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haiti, Honduras, Palau, the United States, many European Union member states, Albania, and the Marshall Islands.

The joint statement endorses an unprecedented appeal from 50 UN human rights experts for the creation of a UN mechanism for monitoring human rights in China. A recent global civil society appeal from over 400 organisations echoed the experts’ call.

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China accepts death of Uyghur man

The Chinese government on October 2 formally accepted to the UN, the death of an Uyghur man, whose family believe had been held in a Xinjiang internment camp since 2017. The Uyghur man’s disappearance was registered with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) in April 2019, but the CCP did not respond to formal inquiries until September this year. In a statement to the WGEID, China said the retired driver named Abdulghafur Hapiz from Kashgar had died almost two years ago, on November 3, 2018, due to severe pneumonia and tuberculosis.

Over one million people from the Uyghur and Turkish Muslim communities in western Xinjiang have been allegedly detained in camps since 2017, under a systematic crackdown on ethnic minorities which world leaders have termed as cultural genocide.

Several leaked documents from China have revealed Beijing’s brutal and systematic crackdown on Uyghurs, in which they have called it a “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism”. After Uyghur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a series of speeches delivered to officials, urged the party to follow America’s policy of “war on terror”.

(Image credit: AP)

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