Geneva, 13 Jan (EFE).
Human rights in China are living through “their darkest period” since the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement under Xi Jinping’s presidency, Human Rights Watch’s annual report said today.
The report recalls how one million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities have been detained in China’s Xinjiang region in recent years, while freedoms in Hong Kong are under attack and repression continues in areas such as Tibet and Inner Mongolia.
“The good news is that there has been an unprecedented backlash against such repression, with the emergence of coalitions of governments that have come together to criticize China,” HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth told EFE.
Examples of this reaction have been the condemnation of the repression in Xinjiang that 39 countries, led by Germany, expressed at the last UN General Assembly, or the decrease in the number of countries that supported China when it came to getting a seat on the UN Human Rights Council.
“This is good news, because the Chinese government is concerned about its international reputation, and it is the way to change a China that is big and powerful but needs a good image that is now being lost through repression,” Roth analyzed.
The report also highlights China’s attempts to put pressure on countries that denounce its practices, such as Australia, which suffered economic sanctions from Beijing in retaliation for its support of an international investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Beijing feared that the research would show that it concealed human-to-human transmission in December 2019 and January 2020, as millions of people left Wuhan and the virus went global,” Roth said.
