“The scale of arbitrary and discriminatory detention” of members of the Muslim minority in the region can constitute “crimes against humanity”, according to the text published Wednesday by the High Commissioner for Human Rights , Michelle Bachelet.
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History will remember that it was at 11:47 p.m. on August 31, only thirteen minutes before the end of his High Commissioner for Human Rights mandate, that Michelle Bachelet published the long-awaited report of the ‘United Nations (UN) on human rights in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Arbitrary detentions, tortures, forced sterilizations … The 46 pages of the report sound as a real indictment against the policy carried out by Beijing. The verdict is final: “The magnitude of the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uighurs and members of other essentially Muslim groups (…) in a context of restrictions and deprivation, more generally, of fundamental rights both individual and collective , can constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity. “
To arrive at this overwhelming conclusion, the UN says it has been informed “at the end of 2017” of “disappearances” in the Xinjiang and to have put itself to work from 2018. The report is based on the writings and declarations of the Chinese authorities they -Mex but also on the work of researchers, sstellite images, free access information as well as in forty in-depth interviews, including twenty-six people who have been interned or have worked in Xinjiang camps since 2016.
The UN condemns both the legal foundations of the policy led by Beijing – “the Chinese anti -terrorist legal system is based on vague and wide concepts” – and its implementation. China has long explained that ouigours guilty of “minor” crimes were not sent to detention centers but to vocational training centers. The UN points out that none of the testimonies that she collected indicates that the “trainees” had the right to get out of these centers, that none had been offered an alternative offer, which most had previously had been detained by the police and that they had never had access to a lawyer.
Worse: two thirds of the twenty-six people interviewed who were held in these “training centers” have reported that they have undergone treatments that can go as far as torture “. Sexual violence in particular with regard to women, administration of force of suspicious drug products … What NGOs have denounced for years is confirmed by testimonies deemed “credible” by the UN.
between 10 % and 20 % of the adult population
While China has always refused to indicate the number of people who, according to her, only “pass” in these “training centers”, the UN indicates that “between 2017 and 2019 at least “This number was” very important “. In the absence of official figures, the UN stresses that researchers estimate that between 10 % and 20 % of the ethnic “adult” would have, at one time or another, been held in these camps. The UN says she did not have the means to check if they had been actually closed in 2019, as China affirms. More broadly, the report also denounces the detention of Uighur artists and intellectuals, as well as the detention of people because of their religious practices.
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