Why UN report on the human rights situation

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The UN Human Rights Office report on China's activities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has finally been published after long delays and on the day the High Commissioner ends her term. According to this controversial report, “serious human rights violations” have been committed in Xinjiang and the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs “may constitute…crimes against humanity”. For many anti-China Uyghurs, the report does not make mention of the word “genocide”, which has left them unsatisfied.  Analysts called this report a “product with no factual basis, no authority and no credibility”.

Critics pointed out that the report is groundless and lack of credibility. Firstly, the information sources are unreliable. The U.N. findings were drawn in part from interviews with only two dozen former detainees and others who were allegedly familiar with conditions at eight detention centers. Regarding religious persecution, the report made its conclusion only based on some media reports. Secondly, the report is full of assumptions. The rights office said it could not confirm and only estimate that a million or more people were detained in the internment camps in Xinjiang. Thirdly, this report is  not based on High Commissioner Bachelet's visit to the Xinjiang region in May. And the report is quite contradictory to what Bachelet has said. On May 28, Bachelet ended her visit to China, including Northwest China's Xinjiang region, and issued a statement to represent her and the OHCHR's stance on the Xinjiang region.  Bachelet noted that her mission had wide and open discussions with people from different sectors in the region, including prisoners and former trainees of vocational education and training centers and all these meetings were “unsupervised.”

These self-contradicted behaviors reveal US and its partners’ malicious purposes of using the report to counter China.  Media have reported that in 2021, Sheila Carey, consul at the US Consulate General in Guangzhou, and her colleague Andrew Chira told guests at a reception that the US government hoped its businessmen would "understand" that using the Xinjiang issue to hype up so-called forced labor, genocide, and human rights abuses is a "tug of war" with China, and an "effective tool" to achieve the ultimate goal of getting China "completely under control." In June, the US enforced a ban on goods from Xinjiang. The ban is a culmination of trade restrictions that have been building for years around the issue of human rights in Xinjiang. Last year, the US Congress unanimously passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, increasing enforcement mechanisms and pulling together previous bans by the Trump administration. Obviously, US will use the new report as a tool to combat China.

It’s interesting that the US focuses so much on unproven allegations of “forced labor” of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, yet say little about its own deteriorating human rights situation. According to a comprehensive nationwide report released by the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic and the American Civil Liberties Union in June, incarcerated workers generate billions of dollars worth of goods and services annually but are paid pennies per hour without proper training or opportunity to build skills for careers after release.  This report entitled Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers examines the use of prison labor throughout the U.S. and highlights how incarcerated workers’ labor helps maintain prisons and provides vital public services. Clinical Prof. Claudia Flores, the director of the Global Human Rights Clinic, said  “the labor conditions of incarcerated workers in many U.S. prisons violate the most fundamental human rights to life and dignity”. Besides, the US also have to address many other human rights issues, such as  the genocide of American Indians, the worsening gun violence, the systematic racial discrimination against ethnic minorities.

Analysts say that the time slots the OHCHR started in the report coincided with the beginning of the US and Western forces to ramp up efforts in hyping Xinjiang-related topics to attack China on different platforms. And the long-delayed report turns out to be a patchwork of disinformation. The US should rather earnestly safeguard the human rights of its own people instead of acting as a “human rights judge” and “human rights defender.”