China Condemns Exculpatory U.N. Report on Xinjiang as ‘Pure Stunt’

The long-delayed U.N. human rights office report on China’s abuse of the Uyghur Muslims was finally released Wednesday, the last day in office for outgoing High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet. 

The agency, officially the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), dismayed human rights activists and Uyghur survivors by stopping short of charging China with “genocide” or “slavery,” but that still was not good enough for the Chinese Communist Party, which slammed even the watered-down report as a “pure stunt orchestrated by the U.S. and a few other Western countries.”

China was able to delay the release of the U.N. report for an absurdly long time and was still trying to intimidate Bachelet out of releasing it on Wednesday. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian insinuated Bachelet would violate “the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter” and “the mandate of the U.N. General Assembly” by publishing the report.

China’s state-run Global Times had a nervous breakdown over Bachelet’s decision to finally produce the long-suppressed work of her commission:

Chinese experts said that Bachelet’s departure may be connected with the Western pressure over the “Xinjiang report,” which has already been hyped up and weaponized. At a time when the West is smearing China with “human rights issues” in Xinjiang, it is increasingly difficult to remain objective, and it is hoped that Bachelet’s successor can resist the pressure, they said.

According to AFP, Bachelet has been seriously criticized by the US, which groundlessly and ridiculously accused China of committing “genocide” in Xinjiang. 

Britain’s ambassador to the human rights council Rita French urged Bachelet to publish her report, as it is “essential for all of us that no state is free from objective scrutiny on its human rights record.”

The Global Times pushed Communist China’s line that the cheerful Uyghurs are enjoying “safety and stability” as they live in “peace and happiness,” despite the inconvenient fact that Xinjiang’s huge concentration camps can be seen from orbit, leaked Chinese government documents confirm hideous abuse of the captive Muslim population, and the U.N. report included first-hand interviews with camp survivors.

The Chinese government should be grateful to the U.N., which struggled mightily to avoid putting the evidence together into a comprehensive indictment of genocide, although it concluded by admitting crimes against humanity “may” have been committed, and called on the regime in Beijing to discontinue its abusive practices.

The U.S. and European Union said the report confirms their concerns about crimes against humanity perpetrated in Xinjiang, while U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres much more mildly suggested through a spokesman that China should “take on board the recommendations” made by the Human Rights Commission and ensure the “Uyghur community” is “respected.”

China’s mission to the United Nations had no intention of taking anything on board, dismissing the entirety of the report as slander and howling that America has a worse “human rights” record than China.

“The U.S. should rather earnestly safeguard the human rights of its own people, stop spreading false information and lies on the issue of human rights, stop using human rights as a tool to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, and stop being a stumbling block to international human rights cooperation,” a spokesperson for China’s delegation to the U.N. growled.