GENEVA - China attempted on Thursday to block a prominent Uighur activist from speaking at the United Nations Human Rights Council, where he demanded the body urgently address allegations of serious violations by Beijing.

Mr Dolkun Isa, a Uighur activist based in Germany and president of the World Uighur Congress, spoke up during a general debate about concerns around the world.

Pointing to a number of recent reports, including one from former UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet, warning of possible crimes against humanity being committed against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, he said the allegations “require the immediate and urgent attention of the council”.

But as soon as he began speaking, China’s representative in the room Mao Yizong demanded the floor to object.

“We have reason to challenge the qualification of the speaker,” he said, insisting that Mr Isa was “not the representative of an NGO (non-governmental organisation), and still less a human rights defender”.

“Rather he is an anti-China, separatist, violence element,” Mr Mao said, speaking in Chinese through an interpreter, warning that “allowing him to engage in separatist activities in the council would be in serious violation of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, as well as the rules of procedure of the Human Rights Council”.

After Mr Mao’s objection, US representative Sam Birnbaum took the floor to insist on Mr Isa’s right to address the council, the top UN rights body.

And council president Vaclav Balek of the Czech Republic pointed out that NGOs are free to pick the speakers that represent them during the debate, and ruled he was entitled to finish his intervention.

Mr Isa had been invited by the NGO Global Human Rights Defence to take its brief speaking slot during the NGO portion of the debate, which comes after the council’s 47 member states and numerous observer countries have voiced their positions.

‘Disinformation’

“It’s not the first time the Chinese government has tried to stop me,” Mr Isa told Agence France-Presse later, adding that “China is trying to manipulate the UN rights system”.

As he completed his statement before the council, he lamented that it had failed last October to agree to even put the Xinjiang issue on the agenda, despite the damning findings in Ms Bachelet’s report.

That report, published minutes before Ms Bachelet’s term ended on Aug 31, 2022, highlighted “credible” allegations of widespread torture, arbitrary detention and violations of religious and reproductive rights.

It brought UN endorsement to long-running allegations that Beijing detained more than one million Uighurs and other Muslims in prison camps.

Mr Isa told AFP his mother died in such a camp a few years ago, and that two of his brothers were serving lengthy sentences.

During China’s intervention in the UN debate, representative Li Xiaomei alleged the United States and others “out of their own political agenda fabricate and spread disinformation” about the rights situation in China.

US ambassador Michele Taylor flatly rejected that statement, pointing to the numerous expert findings of “evidence of serious abuses, including possible crimes against humanity”. AFP