BEIJING: The UN human rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s ongoing China tour is under sharp global scrutiny whether it will be an indictment or endorsement of Beijing’s human rights record.
Bachelet met state councillor and foreign minister Wang Yi in the southern city of Guangzhou on Monday where the top Chinese diplomat said that he hoped that the UN official’s visit would “…help enhance understanding and cooperation, and clarify misinformation”.
“To advance the international cause of human rights, we must first… refrain from politicising human rights,” Wang told her.
“We will be discussing sensitive, important human rights issues, and I hope this visit will help us work together to advance human rights in China and globally,” Bachelet’s office tweeted on her meeting with Wang.
Bachelet and Wang’s meeting added another layer of scepticism about the UN official’s visit: Instead of addressing the questions and voicing the concerns of thousands of Uighur, Tibetan and Hong Kong activists, the visit will be a stamp of approval for China, human rights activists predict.
Bachelet’s visit is being conducted in a “closed loop”, a way of isolating people within a “bubble” with no access to outsiders to prevent the Covid-19 virus from potentially spreading; no press is travelling with her either.
Most rights advocates Hindustan Times reached out to are not expecting much from the visit given Bachelet’s “weak” history on questioning China’s human rights records, and the fact that it will be a “curated” visit, choreographed by Chinese officials especially in Xinjiang.
Bachelet’s visit between May 23 and 28, which started in Guangzhou, will take her to Urumqi and Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
Not much else is known about her itinerary in China and her office refused to share details about it, suggesting instead to stay tuned in for a press conference she will address at the end of her visit.
Bachelet’s time in XUAR will be under close scrutiny given that the China has been accused of large-scale human rights violation against the Uighur Muslim community, in particular, in the remote region.
The allegations include incarceration of around one million people from minority Muslim communities in detention camps, forced labour in manufacturing units of the resource-rich Xinjiang, forced abortions, and mass indoctrination.
China has consistently denied the allegations, calling it a smear campaign carried out by western countries; the government has said the camps are “vocational training institutes”.
“The fact that it took her more than three years to negotiate a visit – let alone visit – shows China’s power…A P5 member state, which has committed some of the worst human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch’s China director, Sophie Richardson said.
It’s likely that Bachelet will be chaperoned around Urumqi and Kashgar where she will witness choreographed events and cultural programmes and meet Communist Party of China (CPC)-appointed religious leaders; her likely visit to the “Idkah mosque” in Kashgar could be a highlight of her tour.
Rights activists are worried about the same possibility.
“Like many other analysts on China, I’m concerned about how the orchestrated visit with all the arrangements by the Chinese government can have any meaningful outcome and findings from her trip,” said Patrick Pook, a visiting researcher at Meiji University in Tokyo.
“The High Commissioner should ask for full access to the region (XUAR), unsupervised interviews with affected individuals, and on-site investigations,” said Alkan Akad from Amnesty International.
“As Amnesty International, we are concerned that Chinese authorities will make every effort to restrict her access, tightly control her itinerary, and orchestrate the trip in a way to cover up what has been taking place in the region,” Akad added.
The high commissioner for human rights is the UN’s top official with an explicit mandate to promote and protect human rights around the world, and the
The last time Beijing allowed her office to visit China was in 2005.
“In other words, this visit is a big deal. China has changed tremendously since 2005 – the Chinese government has become a lot more abusive than it was in 2005, and a high commissioner for human rights, if she is doing her job, should be much stronger in condemning the country’s human rights records, particularly those against Uighurs and Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, which HRW says constitute crimes against humanity,” HRW’s China researcher, Maya Wang. who described the visit as “curated”, said.
Rights groups said Bachelet’s team should also establish a long-lasting effective communication mechanism with Chinese authorities to find out information on the whereabouts and conditions of reportedly disappeared or arbitrarily detained individuals
“That list (of disappeared individuals) should be really long,” HRW’s Richardson said.
