UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Wednesday said she was unable to visit detained Uighurs and that she was accompanied by authorities while visiting Xinjiang, remarks that raise questions about the Chinese government’s efforts to influence her trip.
“I was not able to speak to any Uighurs currently detained or their families during the visit,” Bachelet told a meeting of the Human Rights Council, adding that the visit to China faced “limitations, especially given the prevailing COVID restrictions.”
Bachelet did say the government helped her meet “all institutions I had asked to meet, such as senior members of key ministries, the judiciary, business, academia and other relevant stakeholders,” and repeated that her trip was not an “investigation.”
Photo: Reuters
Human rights advocates have criticized Bachelet’s visit to China — the first by a UN human rights chief since 2005. Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said earlier it gave the Chinese government the lack of criticism on human rights that it desired.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s press office also said that Washington was concerned about Beijing’s efforts to manipulate Bachelet’s travels because conditions imposed by the government would not allow for an “independent assessment of the human rights environment.”
Rights issues have turned into a flashpoint in China-US ties. The topic is likely to become even more charged on Tuesday next week, when the US will start blocking imports from Xinjiang under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act unless companies can prove the goods were not made with forced labor.
China has called on the US to abandon the law, and regularly denies it commits abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere. The US, lawmakers in some nations and rights groups say China’s activities in Xinjiang amount to genocide against minority groups.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) signaled his nation is unlikely to back down on the issue, writing in a Chinese Communist Party magazine this month that certain nations “have been forcibly promoting Western democratic human rights concepts and systems in the world and using human rights issues to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, resulting in frequent wars, long-term social unrest and displacement of people in some countries.”
On Tuesday, the Netherlands issued a statement on behalf of the 47 members of the Human Rights Council that told Bachelet the members are “gravely concerned about the human rights situation in Xinjiang.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS