China Holds ‘Human Rights Forum’ While Conducting Genocide

China, a brutal Communist tyranny that practices slavery and genocide against minorities like the Tibetans and Uyghurs, became the improbable host of a “Forum on Global Human Rights Governance” Wednesday.

China’s state-run Global Times crowed that the forum managed to convince “more than 300 scholars, officials, and experts of the United Nations and non-governmental organizations from nearly 100 countries” to participate, grotesquely praising the Chinese slave state’s “achievements on human rights developments” and holding the regime in Beijing up as a model for “developing countries.”

“China has always spared no effort to promote and protect human rights and it has indeed made remarkable achievements during this process,” the Global Times deadpanned.

The Chinese were particularly pleased that a top U.N. human rights official was in attendance:

Veronica Birga, chief of staff from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, also attended the forum on Wednesday and expressed her appreciation for China for hosting the important event to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action.

Birga said that during this important anniversary year, the world aspires for the two milestone documents – the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – to affirm the unwavering commitment to the promotion and protection of human rights for all individuals, irrespective of their differences or backgrounds.

She also called on unity to reset understanding, regain trust in the power of human rights and to forge a new worldwide consensus of human rights.

As usual, the Global Times complained that the Western concept of human rights is just a racket designed to keep growing powers like China down and that all complaints about the Uyghur genocide are merely “efforts to politicize human rights issues and to use them as weapons to contain developing countries.”

Chinese officials attending the sham “human rights conference” also used the old communist attack line of claiming that Western countries “neglect their own problems on human rights” while daring to criticize China for herding millions of people into concentration camps, forcing them to work for slave wages in factories, jailing and torturing dissidents, ruthlessly crushing pro-freedom movements, and even sending operatives to keep harassing Chinese emigrants even after they have moved to free countries.

Watch — Chinese Concentration Camp Survivor: I Saw People Tortured for Denying Xi Jinping Is God

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“There is no one pattern of human rights that can fit all countries in the world, and every country should and can only explore their own way on human rights based on the country’s context and people’s needs,” insisted Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu.

This idea nullifies the entire concept of human rights and would make the jobs of every foreigner who attended the Chinese conference superfluous. After all, there is no reason to spend lavish sums on U.N. offices if human rights in China are whatever the Chinese Communist Party says they are, human rights in Syria are defined by dictator Bashar Assad, the Taliban defines them in Afghanistan, and so forth.

Other than Birga, the Global Times came up a little short on quotable “human rights experts” at the forum who were not on Beijing’s payroll, such as the chairman of China’s Belt and Road Institute in Sweden and a professor from Nankai University.

It is difficult to find a reputable international human rights activist who thinks China has much to offer on the subject. Even the office Birga represents, the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, found China guilty of “serious human rights violations” in a much-delayed report on the Uyghur genocide roundly denounced as a whitewash because the Chinese Communist Party interfered with the U.N. mission. When even the whitewashed U.N. report finds a regime guilty of torture, it has no business hosting a human rights forum.

Tellingly, very little attention was paid to the Beijing Forum on Global Human Rights Governance outside of state media in China and a few of its allies. The true audience for the forum is the host of developing nations China is luring into its orbit. A major element of Beijing’s sales pitch to developing nations is that it will not judge them for human rights violations, as America or Europe would.

The Lawfare blog in May 2022 concisely described China’s agenda as “a concept of human rights that is conducive to autocratic rule and inimical to outside advocacy.” Under dictator Xi Jinping, China is “promoting its vision across the globe as an alternative human rights framework that is superior to the liberal status quo.”

Lawfare pithily dubbed this approach “normfare,” a play on “lawfare” that describes “the strategic promotion of favored interpretations of international norms for political ends.” The trick is to convince a critical mass of nation-states and international groups to accept the new norms or at least stop objecting to them. The number of people who are not paid in yuan that would show up for a “Forum on Global Human Rights Governance” hosted by the butchers of Tiananmen Square is a good measure of how successful this crusade has been.