China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday.
At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is through the “secret conditionality” of its donations to the governing body, Reilly wrote.
Photo: Screen grab from parliamentlive.tv’s Web site
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) “imposes a secret conditionality across UN agencies that the monies so provided may not be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan,” she said.
“Essentially, the PRC instumentalises the UN to increase pressure on” small island developing states and least developed countries, “which account for a majority of states that still have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, to transfer their allegiance to the PRC,” she said.
The “Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch in OHCHR, a French national, was secretly providing the PRC with advance information on which human rights activists planned to attend the Human Rights Council,” Reilly wrote.
That information included British citizens and residents, she added.
The families of non-governmental organization (NGO) delegates were visited by Chinese police and “forced to phone them to tell them to stop their advocacy, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest for the period of the meeting, disappeared, sentenced to long prison terms without cause, tortured, or, as regards Uyghurs, put in concentration camps,” she said.
Some individuals had died in detention, and “in at least one case, the Chinese government issued an Interpol red notice against an NGO delegate,” she said.
Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, Reilly said that WHO and UN Environment Programme reports on the origins of COVID-19 “were edited to reduce references to the possibility of a laboratory leak.”
She also included in her “written evidence” a British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office report that said that China is working to “shape the multilateral system to align more with a state-centric, authoritarian world view.”
Tuesday’s inquiry aimed to follow up on a 2021 report by the committee, which concluded that autocratic states were attempting to aggressively co-opt strategically important multilateral organizations and to fundamentally redefine their founding principles.
In Taipei, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday thanked Reilly for speaking out.
“Thank you, @EmmaReillyTweet, for speaking out on how the #PRC corrupts the @UN& the rules-based order. #Taiwan is a known victim of #China’s wrongdoing, but in reality the whole world suffers. We need this brought up in the #G7, #EU & other bodies to counter this evil empire,” it wrote on X.
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