Key Points
- The United Nations has finally handed down a damning report on its assessment of China's treatment of Uyghur people in Xinjiang.
- The report revealed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed "serious human rights violations".
The United Nations has finally handed down a damning report on its assessment of China's treatment of Uyghur people in the Xinjiang province.
The was released just minutes before as her four-year term expired.
The report found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed "serious human rights violations" against Uyghurs, adding that the actions may constitute crimes against humanity.
"The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups ... may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity."
The report said the Chinese government's "counter-terrorism and counter-extremism" system is "deeply problematic".
"It contains vague, broad and open-ended concepts that leave wide discretion to officials to interpret and apply broad investigative, preventive and coercive powers, in a context of limited safeguards and scant independent oversight," the report said.
As a result, it has led to the "large-scale arbitrary deprivation of liberty" of Uyghur and other Muslim communities in Xinjiang.
It said that people were locked in vocational education and training centres between 2017 and 2019, where their treatment was of "equal concern".
"Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence," it said.
So what has reaction to the report been from the Uyghur community?
Uyghur woman Fatimah Abdulghafur has mourned the loss of her father since 2016 - when he suddenly disappeared.
That's the year it's believed China's detention centres were established for Uyghurs and other Turkic-minority groups in the region.
Ms Abdulghafur searched for him constantly but she reached a dead-end at every turn she took. It was only in 2020 that, after filing a UN missing person report, the CCP provided an official response: Her father had died of pneumonia and tuberculosis in 2018.
But she said she is sure that he was taken away after travelling to perform the Islamic pilgrimage of Hajj in Mecca that year. With existing health conditions and little to no medical attention in the detention centres, she was convinced of his fate.
"I was sure that he was taken to the death camp," she said. "He was tortured to death, basically."
What Ms Abdulghafur described as "death camps", the UN report described as "vocational and educational training centres" to "deradicalise" people with "extremist" views. That's the language adopted by the CCP to describe the centres in which one million people were detained.
For Ms Abdulghafur, the UN accepting such terminology renders the report "useless and hurtful and harmful", particularly after she volunteered her time to translate lengthy community reports to the UN about the context of their experiences.
"It's obvious, my father died, and it's not a lie. Everyone knows about it, but why did it happen? The UN made a really useless argument about human rights," she said.
"It's not because we are some kind of extremists. If you don't take the context [of the history] correctly, then your report has no value at all.
"All those years of work, and all the things we did, it's zero. Basically, they just use the name of the UN, and they just reported something from the Chinese official."
The 49-page report also did not make any reference to genocide, which is one of the key allegations made by China's critics, including the United States.
"It's really doing the dirty job for the Chinese regime. So, to us, it's very hurtful," Ms Abdulghafur said.
How do human rights groups view the report?
China's director of Human Rights Watch Sophie Richardson said she is glad to see a "pretty strong assessment" that "speaks to the scope and severity" of the CCP's treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
"This message is critically important in mobilising support from the states to push for a formal investigation that could potentially lead to accountability proceedings," she told SBS News.
"Crimes of this magnitude, which are widespread and systematic, targeted in civilian population, are considered to be among the most serious under international law."
While Ms Richardson believes that this report highlights to the CCP that "accountability is essential", she said that the party-state is a "roadblock" in and of itself. It means that the international community has a responsibility to step up and condemn the human rights violations presented in the report, she said.
"Now is the time for [states] to step up and actually put in place mechanisms for these challenges to be heard, and for an investigation to move ahead."
SBS News has contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.
Why was this report so controversial?
The report's release comes three years after it was first commissioned, with long delays despite it being ready for publication months ago.
It was headed by Ms Bachelet, who visited China on a six-day trip in May this year as the first UN human rights commissioner to do so in 17 years.
During her visit, she visited Xinjiang but stopped short of condemning the CCP's treatment of Uyghurs in her assessment at the time.
The outgoing United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, has released a damning report against China's treatment of Uyghur people in the Xinjiang province. Source: AAP / Paolo Aguilar / EPA
Amid brewing tensions, Ms Bachelet announced her resignation, with her last day slated for 31 August.
And with only 15 minutes before her tenure came to an end, the highly controversial report was released to the public, no doubt drawing the ire of China.
What has China had to say?
Speaking ahead of the report's release, China's ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Zhang Jun, said Beijing had repeatedly voiced opposition to it.
"We all know, so well, that the so-called Xinjiang issue is a completely fabricated lie out of political motivations and its purpose definitely is to undermine China's stability and to obstruct China's development," he told reporters last week.
"We do not think it will produce any good to anyone, it simply undermines the cooperation between the United Nations and a member state."
Initially, China denied the existence of any detention camps in Xinjiang.
Then in 2018, the government said it had set up the centres for the purpose of "deradicalisation". In 2019, Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir said all trainees had "graduated".
But the new report has argued that even if these centres have been shut down or reduced, the policies and laws that underpin their operation are still in place.
