China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang – including mass extrajudicial detentions, family separations and forced labour – is by now well documented, despite the secrecy surrounding it. Yet when Michelle Bachelet visited the region earlier this year, the usually outspoken UN human rights chief adopted some of the Chinese Communist party’s framing of the issue. As a long-awaited report into the region remained unpublished on her desk, human rights groups grew concerned that it might be watered down or suppressed entirely.
But on Wednesday night, months after its completion and only minutes before she left office, she finally issued the document. Reading its 46 pages, it is little surprise that Beijing sought to block its release. It states clearly that “serious human rights violations” against Uyghurs may amount to crimes against humanity. China embarked on what it portrays as a counter-extremism and counter-terrorism crackdown after deadly attacks inside and outside Xinjiang. But as the report makes clear, the official conception of terrorism and extremism is so vague that an extraordinarily wide range of normal activity has been targeted, to devastating effect.
“Resisting government propaganda” and closing restaurants during Ramadan have been listed as signs of extremism. Detainees have reportedly been sent to “vocational education centres” – Beijing’s term for the detention camps, when it finally acknowledged them – for speaking to relatives abroad or for having too many children; some were told that a quota had to be filled. Former detainees describe enduring torture, including beating with electric batons, forced sterilisation and sexual violence. The report describes these accounts as credible.
None of this is new. A mass of evidence has emerged from former detainees and their families, as well as scholars and campaigners combing through official Chinese documents, satellite photos and other data. But its publication by the UN, and especially by Ms Bachelet, whose visit had been described as “vindication” by one Chinese diplomat, gives it a status that Beijing cannot ignore. (Instead, China released its own report, blaming “anti-China forces” for a document that “wantonly smears and slanders” the country and interferes in its internal affairs.)
Companies and countries can no longer claim, as they have done, that it isn’t clear what is happening in the region, or that action can be left to the UN. China has said the centres have closed; while at least some have done, many of the detainees appear to have been transferred to work in factories or jailed on the flimsiest grounds. Intensive surveillance polices Uyghurs outside custody. Families remain separated. Countries – including the many Muslim-majority nations that have remained silent – should take this report as a spur to action and an opportunity to press China on these terrible abuses. It must now be tabled at the Human Rights Council, where member states should push hard for investigation. The council also notes the credible accounts of “intimidations, threats and reprisals” – including the prospect of forced return – for Uyghurs campaigning from abroad, without whom many abuses would not have come to light. They must be given the protection that other countries cannot provide to Uyghurs inside China.
