UN human rights chief cleared for Xinjiang visit
United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet will visit China, including a trip to Xinjiang, after reaching an agreement with Beijing, she said yesterday.
“I am pleased to announce that we have recently reached an agreement with the government of China for a visit,” Bachelet said in a video address to the UN’s Human Rights Council, adding that the trip was expected to take place in May.
“The government has also accepted the visit of an advanced [Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights] team to prepare [for] my stay in China, including a visit to Xinjiang and other places,” Bachelet said.
The UN’s top human rights official has been negotiating with Beijing since September 2018 about a visit to Xinjiang, where some 1 million mainly Uygur Muslims are alleged to have been held in mass detention camps.
China has defended its policies in the region, saying they are designed to counter terrorism.
The Post reported in January that China had agreed to host Bachelet “in the first half of the year after the Beijing Winter Olympics”. Beijing also insisted that Bachelet’s office hold off on publishing a report into Xinjiang ahead of the Games, as requested by Washington, sources familiar with the situation said.
“China also made clear that it wants to define the trip as a friendly visit instead of an investigation with the presumption of guilt,” sources said in January.
Bachelet said she “remained concerned about the treatment of individuals” by local and national authorities, “some of whom have faced restrictions of the freedom of movement, including house arrest, or in some cases have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment based on cumulative challenges stemming from their activities”.
Ahead of Bachelet’s announcement, 192 human rights and advocacy groups published a joint open letter calling on her office to publish its report on Xinjiang.
The letter said experts at the UN Human Rights Council had raised concerns in 2020 about religious and civil rights in Xinjiang, as well as over advocates who had been held under “residential surveillance”, detention at an unknown place without access to family or a lawyer.
“We have been concerned by the relative silence of your office in the face of these grave violations, aside from procedural updates on the status of negotiations to gain meaningful access to Xinjiang,” they said in the letter.