The UN’s top human rights official will visit Xinjiang next week, where Beijing is accused of persecuting the Uyghur minority. A high-risk visit as the international pressure is great.
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Michelle Bachelet’s visit to China — from May 23 to 28 — is highly anticipated. This is the first visit to the country by a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2005, when Canadian Louise Harbor visited.
The 70-year-old former Chilean president has been pushing for access to all parts of China since joining the High Commission in 2018.
From her first speech, she had pointed out the “deeply disturbing allegations of large-scale arbitrary detentions of Uyghurs and other Muslim communities, in re-education camps in the Xinjiang region”.
Labor camps
According to human rights organizations, at least a million Uyghurs and members of other Turkic minorities, mainly Muslims, are or have been incarcerated in camps in Xinjiang.
Beijing contests, saying that they are vocational training centers intended to keep them away from terrorism and separatism, after numerous deadly attacks attributed to Islamists or Uyghur separatists.
Ms. Bachelet has relentlessly called for “meaningful and unimpeded access” to this region. But Beijing has so far refused any idea of a UN investigation in Xinjiang, claiming that any visit to the region be “friendly”.
After years of negotiations, the UN and Beijing have finally found common ground to organize the visit, but the details have not been made public. Some countries, such as the United States, are concerned about this lack of transparency, which could leave the Chinese authorities too much leeway.
The director in China of Human Rights Watch (HWR) considers “little credibility” that the Chinese government allows Ms. Bachelet “to see everything that it does not want her to see, or that it allows human rights defenders (…) to speak to him without supervision and without fear of reprisals”.
Kashgar and Urumqi
This trip, announced for several weeks, is eagerly awaited and not without risk for Ms. Bachelet, whose mandate is coming to an end without it being known yet whether she plans to run for a second.
“Ms. Bachelet’s legacy as High Commissioner will be measured by her willingness to hold ‘China’ accountable for crimes against humanity committed” during her tenure, HRW’s Sophie Richardson argues.
It is about its “credibility”, believes the NGO.
During her visit, she “will meet a number of senior national and local officials”, underlines a press release from her services, which specifies that she will go to Canton, but also to Xinjiang in Kashgar and Urumqi, the regional capital.
A team of five people from the High Commission has already been in the country since April 25, to prepare for his arrival.
This “preparatory team” had to go through quarantine, but Ms. Bachelet, as a high-ranking official visitor, will not have to go through this stage. After the quarantine, the preparatory team was able to travel to Guangzhou and Xinjiang.
The former president of Chile will issue a statement and give a press conference on site at the end of her stay on May 28.
Ms. Bachelet is already under pressure from the United States and other Western countries in particular because she has still not published a report on Xinjiang.
A spokeswoman explained recently that it would not be published before Ms. Bachelet’s departure for China, since it will contain elements of her visit. Like all OHCHR reports, it will be submitted for consideration to the country concerned, so that Beijing can express its point of view.
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