A group of Western nations called on China Tuesday to release all arbitrarily detained Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans and to allow independent human rights observers to visit sites to make assessments.
“Transparency and openness are key to allaying concerns,” said Australian Ambassador to the United Nations James Larsen, during a U.N. General Assembly committee meeting on human rights. “We call on China to allow unfettered and meaningful access to Xinjiang and Tibet for independent observers, including from the U.N., to evaluate the human rights situation.”
Larsen made the statement on behalf of 15 countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany and Japan.
Xinjiang is the autonomous region in northwestern China where the minority Uyghur and Turkic-speaking people live.
Human rights groups accuse Beijing of detaining as many as 1 million ethnic Uyghur Muslims in “reeducation camps” in Xinjiang. It has also cracked down on freedoms in Tibet.
Ambassador Larsen noted reports by several U.N. human rights experts that expressed concerns, including about large-scale arbitrary detention of individuals in Xinjiang, enforced disappearances, forced labor, and the destruction of religious and cultural sites.
“China has had many opportunities to meaningfully address the U.N.’s well-founded concerns,” Larsen said. “Instead, China labeled the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ assessment as ‘illegal and void’ during its Universal Periodic Review adoption in July.”
He noted Tibetans have also been targeted by Beijing for their peaceful expression of political views, had their language, culture, educational and religious rights erode, and experienced restrictions on their travel.
“No country has a perfect human rights record, but no country is above fair scrutiny of its human rights obligations,” Larsen said.
China’s envoy dismissed the accusations, accusing the Western group of “weaponizing” human rights to provoke a confrontation.
“The so-called assessment report on Xinjiang is fraught with lies and deception,” Ambassador Fu Cong told the committee. “It is purely the product of a coercion of OHCHR (the U.N. human rights office) by the United States and a few others.”
Ambassador Fu said the committee should focus its attention on the situation in Gaza, which is a “living hell,” and accused the Western nations of double standards when it comes to the human rights of Muslims.
“This revealed, once again, the true intentions of Australia and the U.S. to use human rights as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs and to curb its development and to broadly suppress developing countries that adhere to an independent and autonomous foreign policy,” he said.
The United States and several other countries have described China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide, a charge Beijing denies.
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