The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, will visit China from May 23 to 28confirmed this Friday in a statement the office that she directs, in which it will be the first visit by a person in charge of this position since 2005.
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The visit will include the city of Canton (south) and those of Urumqi and Kashgar, both in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where serious human rights violations against the Uyghur people and other Muslim minorities in the area have been reported in recent years.
Bachelet will meet in China with senior national and local officials, He will give a lecture at Guangzhou University and give a press conference on the last day of the visit, the statement said.
An advance group from the United Nations office led by Bachelet arrived in China on April 25 to prepare for the High Commissioner’s visit, although during part of this preparatory trip, which also included trips to Xinjiang, the team had to quarantine due to covid pandemic.
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Possible instrumentalization of the visit
This visit, announced several weeks ago, is highly anticipated and not without risks for Bachelet, who has been asking Beijing for “significant and unhindered access” to this region for years.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) expressed this Friday his fear that the Chinese government will use the imminent visit of the high commissioner as a “publicity stunt” and warned that the credibility of the former Chilean president “is at stake.”
“It is hard to believe that the Chinese government allows the high commissioner to see things they do not want her to see, or that they authorize her to speak with human rights defenders, victims and their families,” HRW’s China director said in a statement. Sophie Richardson.
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It’s hard to believe that the Chinese government allows the High Commissioner to see things they don’t want her to see.
“Bachelet’s legacy will be judged by her willingness to hold a powerful state to account for its crimes against humanity,” Richardson said.
HRW also recalled that in September 2021 Bachelet announced that her office was finalizing a report on allegations of human rights violations in Xinjiang, but that it has not yet been published.
“The delay has not been explained, and it is not clear if the report will finally be published or not,” said HRW, who stated that possibly the Chinese authorities are pressuring Bachelet to continue delaying the release of the document or mitigate its conclusions.
Thus, NGOs for the defense of human rights and some members of the international community hope that the High Commissioner will denounce outright the attacks against human rights of which they accuse Beijing. Chinese authorities strongly deny the allegations.
The visit will include a stopover in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have reportedly been detained in so-called re-education centers in recent years.
According to HRW, these practices began with a campaign against “violent extremism” that began in 2014, which has included “systematic policies of mass arrests, torture, cultural persecution and other offenses against the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang.”
EFE and AFP
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