China may be committing crimes against humanity, says a long-awaited report that it tried to stop being released.

Direct pdf link to UN report

Select passages from the BBC article:

The UN has accused China of "serious human rights violations" in a long-awaited report into allegations of abuse in Xinjiang province.

China had urged the UN not to release the report - with Beijing calling it a "farce" arranged by Western powers.

The report assesses claims of abuse against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities, which China denies.

But investigators said they uncovered "credible evidence" of torture possibly amounting to "crimes against humanity".

They accused China of using vague national security laws to clamp down on the rights of minorities and establishing "systems of arbitrary detention".

The report, which was commissioned by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, said prisoners had been subjected to "patterns of ill-treatment" which included "incidents of sexual and gender-based violence".

Others, they said, faced forced medical treatment and "discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies".

The UN recommended that China immediately takes steps to release "all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty" and suggested that some of Beijing's actions could amount to the "commission of international crimes, including crimes against humanity".

...

China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

In response to the Xinjiang Police Files, China's foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that the documents were "the latest example of anti-China voices trying to smear China". He said Xinjiang enjoyed stability and prosperity and residents were living happy, fulfilled lives.

China says the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.

It insists that Uyghur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uyghurs.

China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uyghur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".

Criticism of the report (Reddit comment):

A lot more underwhelming that I expected. Seems to boil down to a few main points:

  1. The XUAR has seen a large rise in acts of terrorism related to religious extremism
  2. To prevent this, China implemented a system of "Vocational Education and Training Centres" (VETCs) to rehabilitate and educate away the extremism

The concern then follows:

  1. China has implemented a system of policing that is overly vague and overreaching, that allows the government to easily place citizens in the VETCs.
  2. China trains their police force in ridiculous manners to identify religious extremism
  3. Once transferred to a VETC, the conditions there are brutal and more akin to a torturous prison.
  4. There are also concerns of erasure of religion and attempted forced birth control

My issue with the report, is the use of a small amount of interviews declared credible, to then corroborate the rest of the sources. These sources include the classic and long debunked Zenz, Xinjiang Police Files, unofficial document translations (long history of bias in translations), etc. Given the long history of terrible witness reliability (Nayirah testimony, SK $900,000 reward to NK defectors, Iraq's WMDs, etc), I'm still going to hold off on agreeing with the accusations of genocide.

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Everything the UN is accusing China of happened and is still happening in US controlled or US influenced parts of Northern Syria and Iraq in general, after the collapse of ISIS hundreds of thousands of refugees were put in camps, detentions centers, and prisons. The conditions of which have predictably allowed ISIS to rebuild itself in small corners of Syria and Iraq thanks to deliberate US policy to just level whole villages (and Mosul)

    No vocational training, no refugee support system, no jobs, nothing, just straight up martial law and all the abuses little and big that come with it, never been an issue for the west, in fact the predominate response to the post-ISIS crisis seemed to have been "keep them out of the west, because they're all brainwashed by living under the rule of ISIL"

    The post-ISIS refugee crisis is one of the world's biggest, probably only behind the Rohingya crisis (oh look another crisis involving a muslim minority the west doesn't care about)

    If any UN sources uses Adrian Zenz, US think-tanks, or US influenced groups as a foundation then the entire report to bullshit, rotten apples and all that

    By way of supplement to the extensive body of documentation, OHCHR also conducted, in accordance with its standard practice and methodology, 40 in-depth interviews with individuals with direct and first-hand knowledge of the situation in XUAR (24 women and 16 men; 23 Uyghur, 16 ethnic Kazakh, 1 ethnic Kyrgyz). Twenty-six of the interviewees stated they had been either detained or had worked in various facilities across XUAR since 2016

    So they didn't have people on the ground, just vague "extensive documentation" which could mean anything from Zenz crap to Chinese official documents, and the whole crux of the report seems to center around 40 interviews done remotely......:side-eye-1:

    Over one third of the 40 interviewees had either not been interviewed by others, or had been interviewed in the past by researchers, civil society or journalists, but opted not to publicly share their experience prior to speaking to OHCHR. Where the assessment quotes directly from an account of an interviewee, OHCHR has accepted the statement as assessed and described to be truthful and relevant, unless stated otherwise

    Also, strangely doesn't confirm whether these interviewees live in Xinjiang or not, no transcripts, no cross-referencing, just "take our word for it, the interviewee said so"

    Also, what about the other two-thirds who were previously interviewed by "civil society and journalists", which "civil society", which journalists interviewed them and when, what's the context, how were they even interviewed if there's such a crackdown?

    • Sephitard9001 [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      China needs to release the Uyghurs they're torturing. Don't believe me, listen to this guy we interviewed: a Uyghur who China released