Michelle Bachelet is criticized for her discretion on the violations of the rights of Uighurs in the Xinjiang region, where she must go in the coming days.
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on an official visit to China – “at the invitation of the Chinese government”, according to Beijing – Monday 23 to Saturday 28 May, Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, must go to Kashgar and Urumqi. These cities are the two main cities of Xinjiang, a region where more than a million Uighurs are detained and where China has committed “a genocide”, according to the accusations of several national parliaments. Due to Zero Covid policy, Michelle Bachelet will not go to Beijing. She was to land in Canton and conduct interviews – probably by video – with Chinese officials, representatives of business circles, diplomats and “civil society organizations”.
This trip is at high risk for the former Chilean President, which is unknown if she will retain her duties at the head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Men’s Rights (OHCHR) after her first Mandate of four years which ends on the 1 er September. “It is the journey of his life,” said the ambassador of a European country in Beijing. In Geneva, international circles critical of the policy of appeasement of UN agencies with China consider this displacement as a “almost final crucial test of the agency’s credibility”. Friday, May 20, Ned Price, spokesperson for the US State Department, said the United States was “very worried” about the conditions of this visit. “We do not think that China guarantees it the necessary access to carry out a complete and not manipulated evaluation of the question of human rights in the Xinjiang.”
What, to whom Michelle Bachelet will have access, and under what conditions? “We are generally not in detail about the terms of reference,” said the spokesperson for the OHCHR. As before all the visits to UN delegations carried out in countries with the complicated context, “the terms of reference” are the subject of a negotiated agreement negotiated in great secrecy between the two parties for months, on what the mission can see or No.
The ambassador of a country from Central European who visited the Xinjiang at the invitation of the Chinese government tells of having realized, during a subsequent exchange with Asian ambassadors who had also made a Travel organized by Beijing in this region, which the passers -by encountered, officially by chance, were each time the same. “We compared the photos and videos taken especially in the markets. They were the same people. Crust,” he says.
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