Uyghur crisis discussion on sidelines of UN General Assembly goes ahead despite intimidation from Beijing

In defiance of a letter from China’s Mission to the United Nations, Western diplomats publicly discussed Beijing’s oppression of the Uyghur people on Tuesday in New York on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly.

Prior to the event on the first anniversary of a UN report that found China’s arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and torture of its Turkic Muslim peoples may be “crimes against humanity,” China circulated a letter discouraging diplomats from attending the event it said was sponsored by the “notorious anti-China organizations” The Atlantic Council, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

“They are obsessed with fabricating lies and spreading malicious disinformation about Xinjiang with no respect for the truth, and are plotting to use human rights issues as a political tool to undermine Xinjiang’s stability and disrupt China’s peaceful development,” a copy of the letter obtained by The China Project said.

But human rights advocates and diplomats at the event publicly went ahead and discussed the findings of the report former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet released in September 2022.

“The P.R.C.’s continued attempts to intimidate and silence those speaking out on human rights is yet another example of its global campaign of transnational repression,” Beth Van Schaack, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, said in opening remarks at the event a mile from UN headquarters at the St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan. “This is why we must view this assessment as the beginning — not the end — of the High Commissioner’s attention to this ongoing situation.”

Other countries whose government representatives were present at the event or registered to view it online included Canada, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand, according to a source familiar with the guest list but unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals by China.

After the livestreamed discussion of the year-old UN report, two diplomats not on the scheduled program stood from the floor to take the microphone and voice public support for their efforts in defiance of China’s request they not attend.

“The Dutch government didn’t take heed of the note we received,” Katja Lasseur, head of the Development, Humanitarian Affairs & Human Rights section of the government of the Netherlands, said. Lasseur added that the failure of the UN to spark broader discussion of Bachelet’s report in the Human Rights Council in 2022 “was disappointing.”

“The Netherlands sees the Human Rights Council as the best place to follow up to the report,” Lasseur said, adding that in October, Volker Türk, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, would visit the Netherlands, where the Dutch government would “discuss with him what options he sees to keep this situation on the international agenda.”

Sophie Richardson, the outgoing China Director at Human Rights Watch, said that the letter circulated by China’s Mission to the UN was typical.

“Beijing is willing to spend enormous resources to keep this conversation from moving ahead at the United Nations,” said Richardson, noting that as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China soon will undergo a Universal Periodic Review by its peers of its human rights record.

“We’ve already begun documenting efforts to keep independent civil society from participating in that process,” Richardson said.

Alongside Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur activist and lawyer, and Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, event panelist Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein spoke from the stage to emphasize the importance of public discussion of human rights.

“Speaking out is not saying something that everyone else is saying. It’s speaking when no one else does,” said Al Hussein, a Jordanian prince and diplomat who was the first Asian, Muslim, and Arab to serve as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from 2014 to 2018.

“We want justice for the Uyghur people, and we want those [responsible] held accountable, but there’s no malice toward the Chinese people writ large. We respect their contributions to humanity. To portray us as notorious anti-China people? No. We’re pro people of China who have been removed from that basic access to their rights.”