Fifteen member states of the United Nations were willing to join a statement rebuking China for how it treats people in Xinjiang and Tibet (“Western nations urge transparency on rights in Xinjiang, Tibet,” VOA News, October 22, 2024).
A group of Western nations called on China Tuesday to release all arbitrarily detained Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans and to allow independent human rights observers to visit sites to make assessments.
“Transparency and openness are key to allaying concerns,” said Australian Ambassador to the United Nations James Larsen, during a U.N. General Assembly committee meeting on human rights. “We call on China to allow unfettered and meaningful access to Xinjiang and Tibet for independent observers, including from the U.N., to evaluate the human rights situation.”
Larsen made the statement on behalf of 15 countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany and Japan.
Xinjiang is the autonomous region in northwestern China where the minority Uyghur and Turkic-speaking people live.
Human rights groups accuse Beijing of detaining as many as 1 million ethnic Uyghur Muslims in “reeducation camps” in Xinjiang. It has also cracked down on freedoms in Tibet.
The demand that China allow independent observers to see what is really happening in Xinjiang and Tibet is fine as far as it goes. But the existing testimony and other evidence about what is going on in these regions is extensive: we know. The statement of the fifteen countries delivered by Larsen goes further, however.
Large-scale
According to the statement, China’s own records pertaining to the “education camps” in Xinjiang provide “evidence of large-scale arbitrary detention, family separation, enforced disappearances and forced labour, systematic surveillance on the basis of religion and ethnicity; severe and undue restrictions on cultural, religious, and linguistic identity and expression; torture and sexual and gender-based violence, including forced abortion and sterilisation; and the destruction of religious and cultural sites.”
We also have many credible reports of “the detention of Tibetans for the peaceful expression of political views; restrictions on travel; coercive labour arrangements; separation of children from families in boarding schools; and erosion of linguistic, cultural, educational and religious rights and freedoms in Tibet.”
The UN has 193 member states. We may assume that China would not join a statement condemning its own vicious policies toward the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others who are victims of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, rape, forced sterilization, forced organ transplants, cultural genocide, and/or murder. This still leaves a lot of countries that either could not be expected to accept the statement or declined to accept it.
The countries that joined the joint statement: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Lithuania, Kingdom of the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Also see:
Gov.UK: “Joint statement on the human rights situation in Xinjiang and Tibet”
The New York Times: “Leaked China Files Show Internment Camps Are Ruled by Secrecy and Spying”
Washington Post: “China is getting away with cultural genocide in Tibet”
