Leer en Español
The United States, along with Canada and six European countries, today formally requested that the United Nations Human Rights Council devote a debate at its next session (February 2023) to discuss the human rights situation in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
The request, also signed by the United Kingdom and the five Nordic countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark), comes in light of the recent report published by the UN Human Rights Office, which pointed to possible crimes against humanity committed in Xinjiang.
At the end of the current session, on October 7, the Human Rights Council will vote on whether to accept this proposal for discussion, which requires a majority vote from among the 47 member countries —which currently includes China itself.
The issue of Xinjiang has been a hot topic at the United Nations this month since the publication of the report of its human rights office on August 31, just minutes before the end of Chile’s Michelle Bachelet’s term as high commissioner.
The document admitted evidence of crimes such as arbitrary detention, torture, cultural persecution, forced labor, and other abuses.
Many of these human rights violations were allegedly committed in the campaign of mass detentions carried out in Xinjiang since the middle of the last decade, according to Beijing, to combat the advance of jihadist terrorism.
Organizations critical of Beijing and Uyghurs in exile accuse China of detaining up to one million people in “re-education camps” where their religion and culture were repressed. At the same time, Beijing initially denied the existence of such centers but later assured that they were vocational training centers.
