UN rights chief not able to speak to detained Uighurs or families on China trip
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GENEVA • United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has said she could not visit detained Uighurs and that she was accompanied by the authorities while visiting Xinjiang, remarks that have raised questions about her trip.
"I was not able to speak to any Uighurs detained or their families," Ms Bachelet told a meeting of the Human Rights Council on Wednesday, adding that the visit to China faced "limitations, especially given the prevailing Covid-19 restrictions".
She did say the government helped her meet "all institutions I had asked to meet, such as senior members of key ministries, the judiciary, business, academia, and other relevant stakeholders", and repeated that her trip was not an "investigation".
Human rights activists have criticised her visit to China, the first by a UN human rights chief since 2005. Human Rights Watch's China director Sophie Richardson said earlier it gave the Chinese government the lack of criticism on human rights it desired.
United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken's press office also said Washington was concerned about Beijing's efforts to manipulate Ms Bachelet's trip because conditions imposed by the government would not allow for an "independent assessment of the human rights environment".
Rights issues have turned into a flashpoint in China-US ties and will likely become even more charged next Tuesday, when the US will start blocking imports from the Xinjiang region under the Uighur Forced Labour Prevention Act unless firms can prove the goods are not made with forced labour.
President Xi Jinping signalled that China is unlikely to back down on the issue, writing in a Communist Party magazine this month that certain nations "have been forcibly promoting Western democratic human rights concepts and systems in the world and using human rights issues to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, resulting in frequent wars, long-term social unrest and displacement of people in some countries".
BLOOMBERG