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The United Nations human rights office allowed the Chinese Communist Party to peruse a draft of its report on the Party’s genocide of non-Han ethnic groups in East Turkistan and “watered down” the evidence most clearly fitting the definition of that atrocity, Politico reported on Thursday.
The Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), the top human rights office in the U.N., published a long-awaited report on the situation in East Turkistan minutes on Wednesday night, minutes before midnight when Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s term would formally end.
The report concluded that the crimes Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz people, and others in East Turkistan have been accusing the majority-Han Communist Party of commmitting against them – from imprisonment in concentration camps to mass sterilization, rape, torture, indoctrination, and razing of historic and religious sites – did occur.
The report claims, however, that the overwhelming evidence is only enough to conclude that China “may” have committed “crimes against humanity” and does not use the word “genocide” anywhere in the text, despite confirming that Chinese officials committed actions that fit the legal definition of “genocide.” The report also did not use the term “slavery” despite confirming extensive evidence of the regime forcing Uyghurs to work in factories, cotton fields, and concentration camps with no evidence of paying them.
The U.N. notably abstained from referring to the network of an estimated 1,200 concentration camps in East Turkistan as “concentration camps,” instead using the Chinese government’s euphemism for the sites, “Vocational Education and Training Centers” (VETCs).
Human rights activists and affected groups have been urging the United Nations to publish its report on the Uyghur genocide for months following Bachelet’s visit to East Turkistan in May. At the time, Bachelet outragously celebrated the Communist Party for its “tremendous achievements” in human rights and did not in any way condemn Beijing’s atrocities against Uyghurs.
Politico, citing anonymous sources, claimed on Thursday that publishing any report at all had been a source of marked controversy at the OHCHR and that Bachelet herself had claimed the report would not be published until after she had vacated the post.
