“It’s utterly a politicized doc that disregards info, and divulges explicitly the try of some Western international locations and anti-China forces to make use of human rights as a political software,” Liu mentioned in an announcement launched by the mission.
The report was revealed simply minutes earlier than the top of U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s four-year time period and after months of unexplained delays. Its findings assist years of advocacy and analysis by rights teams, diplomats, Uyghur exiles and media who’ve documented state-sponsored abuses in opposition to Uyghurs and different minority teams in Xinjiang, together with mass detentions, pressured labor, repressed birthrates and controls on their expressions of tradition and faith.
China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, reiterated his authorities’s opposition to the report, based on a video launched by the mission on Thursday.
“Everyone knows so effectively that the so-called Xinjiang problem is totally a fabricated lie out of political motivations. Its goal positively is to undermine China’s stability and hinder China’s improvement,” he mentioned, telling Bachelet to “keep away from interfering” in China’s inside affairs.
In a joint assertion signed by 63 Uyghur advocacy teams, activists praised the report because the “most definitive evaluation of the problems confronted by Uyghurs and different Turkic peoples” in China.
“This can be a recreation changer for the worldwide response to the Uyghur disaster,” mentioned Uyghur Human Rights Venture Govt Director Omer Kanat. “Regardless of the Chinese language authorities’s strenuous denials, the U.N. has now formally acknowledged that horrific crimes are occurring.”
The report was primarily based on in-depth interviews with 40 firsthand witnesses, together with 26 who had been detained in amenities in Xinjiang since 2016. The U.N. rights workplace mentioned that greater than a 3rd of the interviewees had not beforehand spoken to researchers or the media.
Primarily based on these interviews, the U.N. rights workplace mentioned that it was “affordable to conclude {that a} sample of large-scale arbitrary detention” occurred in amenities that Chinese language officers describe as free vocational coaching facilities. These detentions occurred not less than between the years of 2017 and 2019, “affecting a good portion” of the Uyghur and different Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, the report concluded.
The report additionally identified that descriptions by interviewees of those facilities supplied proof of “patterns of torture or different types of merciless, inhuman or degrading therapy or punishment.” Allegations of sexual and gender-based violence, together with of rape, “additionally seem credible,” the report added.
Some researchers and activists who argue that Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang quantity to genocide had been upset the U.N. report didn’t point out the problem. The joint letter by Uyghur organizations referred to as on U.N. Workplace on Genocide Prevention to conduct an evaluation, and for the U.N. Human Rights Council to determine a fee of inquiry to independently study the problem.
“The Workplace of the Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights has waited far too lengthy to ship its report,” mentioned Rushan Abbas, govt director of the Marketing campaign for Uyghurs. “Stopping genocide was a foundational goal of the U.N., and it should be upheld now.”
The U.N. rights workplace referred to as on Beijing to launch all these arbitrarily detained and supply explanations to members of the family who’ve for years referred to as for info on their family who disappeared within the Chinese language area. The report additionally referred to as on governments to “chorus from returning” Uyghurs and different Turkic teams to China and to supply humanitarian help to them.
Emily Rauhala in Brussels and Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.
