A visit by EU ambassadors to the Xinjiang region of China has stalled over their request for access to jailed Uighur academic Ilham Tohti, a diplomatic source said yesterday.
China said it has since 2019 invited foreign diplomats and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to visit Xinjiang, where rights groups allege more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are detained in internment camps.
However, there has been little sign of progress.
A European diplomat told reporters that it was because the mission wants to visit Tohti, a Uighur economist jailed for life on separatism charges in 2014.
He received the Sakharov Prize — the EU’s top human rights award — in 2019.
“Negotiations are in a stalemate because of Tohti and other conditions,” the diplomat said. “I don’t think they are going soon.”
Chinese Ambassador to the EU Zhang Ming (張明) on Tuesday said “almost everything had been arranged” for EU member states’ ambassadors to visit Xinjiang.
However, it had snagged on “unacceptable requests,” he added.
“They insist on a meeting with one criminal convicted by Chinese law,” he said. “This is unacceptable, I’m so sorry.”
China has denied allegations of abuse involving Uighurs in Xinjiang and said that all inmates have “graduated” from “vocational training centers,” which it claims have helped stamp out extremism in the region and raise incomes.
A delegation of three EU officials who took part in a carefully organized Xinjiang visit in January 2019 previously said they believed the people they met in a “training center” were reciting a dictated speech.
Zhang added that Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) extended an invitation to Bachelet on March 7, after she late last month called for an “independent and comprehensive assessment of the human rights situation” in Xinjiang.
He said that Xinjiang is “open to foreign diplomats, journalists and tourists.”
All foreign journalists have faced extensive harassment and surveillance from Chinese authorities when attempting to report from Xinjiang over the past year, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China has said.
When Melinda Gates asked her husband, Microsoft Corp cofounder Bill Gates, to let her coauthor the 2013 annual letter about their foundation, the conversation blew up into a fight. “It got hot,” Melinda Gates wrote in her 2019 book The Moment of Lift. “Bill said the process we had for the Annual Letter had been working well for the foundation for years, and he didn’t see why it should change,” she wrote. Ultimately, Bill Gates agreed for her to write a separate piece about contraceptives, while he penned the main letter about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work. In the next year’s letter,
Part of a huge rocket that launched China’s first module for its Tianhe space station is falling back to Earth and could make an uncontrolled re-entry at an unknown landing point. The 30m-high core of the Long March 5B rocket on Thursday launched the “Heavenly Harmony” uncrewed core module into low Earth orbit from Wenchang in China’s Hainan Province. The Long March 5B then itself entered a temporary orbit, setting the stage for one of the largest-ever uncontrolled re-entries. Some experts fear it could land on an inhabited area. “It’s potentially not good,” said Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard
Remnants of China’s largest rocket launched last week were expected to plunge back through the atmosphere late yesterday or early today, a US federally funded space-focused research and development center said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday that most debris from the rocket would be burned up on re-entry and is highly unlikely to cause any harm, after the US military said that what it called an uncontrolled re-entry was being tracked by US Space Command. In a Twitter post sent on Friday evening in the US, the Aerospace Corporation said that the latest prediction for the re-entry of
SPIKE LOOMING: Many scientists believe a lack of testing is resulting in a sharp undercounting of cases, with one model forecasting 1,018,879 deaths by the end of July The COVID-19 wave that plunged India into the world’s biggest health crisis has the potential to worsen in coming weeks, with some research models projecting that the death toll could more than double from present levels. A team at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru used a mathematical model to predict that about 404,000 deaths would occur by June 11 if current trends continue. A model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington forecast 1,018,879 deaths by the end of July. While COVID-19 cases can be hard to predict, particularly in a sprawling nation like
RSS