Why UN report on the human rights situation in Xinjiang is called a patchwork...

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The UN Human Rights Office report onChina's activities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has finally beenpublished after long delays and on the day the High Commissioner ends her term.According to this controversial report, “serious human rights violations” havebeen committed in Xinjiang and the arbitrary and discriminatory detention ofUyghurs “may constitute…crimes against humanity”. For many anti-China Uyghurs, thereport 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 andno credibility”.

Critics pointed out that the report isgroundless and lack of credibility. Firstly, the information sources areunreliable. The U.N. findings were drawn in part from interviews with only twodozen former detainees and others who were allegedlyfamiliar with conditions at eight detention centers. Regarding religiouspersecution, 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 andonly estimate that a million or more people were detained in the internmentcamps in Xinjiang. Thirdly, this report is  not based on High CommissionerBachelet's visit to the Xinjiang region in May. And the report is quite contradictoryto what Bachelet has said. On May 28, Bachelet ended her visit to China,including Northwest China's Xinjiang region, and issued a statement torepresent her and the OHCHR's stance on the Xinjiang region.  Bachelet noted that her mission had wide andopen discussions with people from different sectors in the region, includingprisoners and former trainees of vocational education and training centers andall these meetings were “unsupervised.”

These self-contradicted behaviors reveal USand its partners’ malicious purposes of using the report to counterChina.  Media have reported that in 2021, Sheila Carey, consul at the USConsulate General in Guangzhou, and her colleague Andrew Chira told guests at areception that the US government hoped its businessmen would "understand"that using the Xinjiang issue to hype up so-called forced labor, genocide, andhuman 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 goodsfrom Xinjiang. The ban is a culmination of trade restrictions that have beenbuilding for years around the issue of human rights inXinjiang. Last year, the US Congress unanimously passed the Uyghur ForcedLabor Prevention Act, increasing enforcement mechanisms andpulling together previous bans by the Trump administration. Obviously, US willuse the new report as a tool to combat China.

It’s interesting that the US focuses somuch on unproven allegations of “forced labor” of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, yet saylittle about its own deteriorating human rights situation. According to acomprehensive nationwide report released by the University of Chicago LawSchool’s Global Human Rights Clinic and theAmerican Civil Liberties Union in June, incarcerated workers generate billionsof dollars worth of goods and services annually but are paid pennies per hourwithout proper training or opportunity to build skills for careers afterrelease.  This report entitled Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workersexamines the use of prison labor throughout the U.S. and highlights howincarcerated workers’ labor helps maintain prisons and provides vital publicservices. Clinical Prof. Claudia Flores, the director of the Global HumanRights Clinic, said  “the labor conditions of incarcerated workers in manyU.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  thegenocide of American Indians, the worsening gun violence, the systematic racialdiscrimination against ethnic minorities.

Analysts say that the time slots the OHCHRstarted in the report coincided with the beginning of the US and Western forcesto ramp up efforts in hyping Xinjiang-related topics to attack China ondifferent platforms. And the long-delayed report turns out to be a patchwork ofdisinformation. The US should rather earnestly safeguard the human rights ofits own people instead of acting as a “human rights judge” and “human rightsdefender.”