Beijing backs UN Human Rights Council’s rejection of Uyghur debate
Beijing, Oct 7 (EFE).- Beijing on Friday claimed that “the international community would not be easily misled” after the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) voted against holding a debate on the situation of human rights in Xinjiang.
Last month a group of Western countries led by the United States and Norway presented to the HRC a first draft resolution, which proposed that the next session of this body – to be held between February and March 2023 – discuss, as a bare minimum, the conclusions reached in a UN report citing serious violations against this community by Beijing.
The report noted “serious human rights violations” against members of the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group that could amount to crimes against humanity.
On Thursday the 47-member council in Geneva voted 19-17 against with 11 abstentions, representing a serious setback for the Western allies.
“For some time now, the US and some other Western countries have been misinforming the public about Xinjiang and seeking political manipulation in the name of human rights simply to smear China’s image and contain China’s development,” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement Friday.
It accused the Western allies of using “UN human rights bodies as a tool to interfere in China’s internal affairs and to serve the agenda of using Xinjiang to contain China.”
“The international community would not be easily misled,” it added. “The agenda pushed by the US and some other Western forces have again failed to gain international support.”
The ministry claimed that “issues related to Xinjiang are not about human rights,” but about “countering violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism” and stressed that “there has been no violent terrorist incident in Xinjiang for over five consecutive years.”
Likewise, it claimed that “in recent years, nearly 100 countries, including many Islamic countries, have spoken out at the Human Rights Council, the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly and elsewhere openly to support China’s just position on issues related to Xinjiang.”
Mainly Western governments and human rights groups accuse Beijing of a massive campaign of detaining around 1 million Uyghurs in “re-education” camps with the argument of stopping the spread of terrorism in this community of some 13 million people.
China categorically denies forced labor, internment camps and oppression of religious practices in Xinjiang and considers information to that effect as unfounded accusations. EFE
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