Whistleblower: UN fired me over its naming of Uyghur dissidents

‘China uses the information to put pressure on their families, to arrest their families and torture them’

A HUMAN rights lawyer has been fired by the United Nations after accusing it of giving China the names of Uyghur dissidents.

Emma Reilly, 42, who worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, had for many years complained loudly that her employer was seriously endangering the family members of dissidents in their native country.

She said that identifying the dissidents had enabled Beijing to put pressure on them not to make the trip to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Switzerland and had led, in some cases, to arrests, torture and at least one death in detention in China.

Beijing has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Muslim Uyghur population in the north-west region of Xinjiang.

“When people are planning to come to the Human Rights Council to challenge China about this genocide, instead of helping them, the UN passes their names to China,” Ms Reilly told LBC last year. “China uses that information to put pressure on their families, to have their family members call and tell them not to come, to arrest their families, to detain them in the camps, to torture them. I have been denouncing this since 2013.”

Deprived of her office for the past two years, Ms Reilly took the UN to its internal employment court but to no avail.

A spokesman for Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, denied that the UN was “in the business of firing whistleblowers and helping China with suppressing dissidents”. He said that Ms Reilly’s allegations “relate to a discontinued historical practice where the names of participants... were occasionally confirmed to states in limited circumstances and with care to ensure that no action of UNHRC would endanger any human rights activists”.

Ms Reilly was fired, he said, because: “All staff members are obliged to comply with staff regulations. We have exhaustively followed all the appropriate proceedings to handle the complaints filed by Ms Reilly.”

In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde this week, Ms Reilly, who is now based in Paris, called for an independent investigation into her allegations. According to the newspaper, China asked for the names of dissidents before six human rights council sessions between March 2013 and October 2015.

Rupert Colville, the spokesman for the UN Human Rights Commissioner, told the newspaper: “We have been clear that the limited use of this practice, noted at first, ceased in 2015, namely six years ago.”

Ms Reilly has insisted that the practice has continued, at least orally. She tweeted yesterday: “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it.”