US Commission Urges UN Report on Uyghurs Before Beijing Olympics
The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers, is calling on the United Nations human rights office to release its assessment on the plight of the persecuted Uyghur ethnic group in China’s Xinjiang region before the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics.
“Doing so would provide a global public service as the international community’s attention turns to China while it hosts this international spectacle,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), chair and co-chair of the CECC, in a letter addressed to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet.
The lawmakers added, “It would also reaffirm the fact that no country is beyond scrutiny or above international law.”
Several Western governments, including the United States, Netherlands, and the UK, have said that the Chinese regime is committing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. More than 1 million of them are currently being detained in internment camps where they are known to be subject to abuses including forced sterilization, forced abortion, rape, torture, forced labor, and the removal of children from their families.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has denied abuses in Xinjiang and claimed the camps are “vocational training centers.”
In September last year, Bachelet, speaking before the Human Rights Council in Geneva, said she regretted that her office was not able to report progress to “seek meaningful access” to Xinjiang.
Three months later, her office said it was finalizing its assessment of the situation in China’s Xinjiang region in the coming weeks, despite having made “no concrete congress” in talks with CCP officials on a proposed visit to the region.
The 2022 Winter Games, to be held in China’s capital Beijing, are scheduled to start on Feb. 4. The United States, Australia, Canada, Lithuania, and the UK are among a group of countries that have announced diplomatic boycotts against the competition.
The United States will still send its athletes to the Games but not an official delegation.
António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has drawn criticism after he accepted an invitation last month from the International Olympic Committee to attend the Games in Beijing.
A coalition of 250 civil society groups, known as No Beijing 2022, is calling on Guterres to reconsider his decision to attend the Games, according to their joint statement issued on Jan. 14.
“Your participation would undermine the United Nations’ efforts to hold China accountable and go against the core principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and relevant treaties,” the group wrote.
“As the highest representative of the U.N., your attendance will be seen as credence to China’s blatant disregard for international human rights laws and serve to embolden the actions of the Chinese authorities.”
