The UN Report on China’s Detention of Minorities in Xinjiang

In 2018, fresh off her second stint as Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet took on the job of High Commissioner of the United Nations Office for Human Rights. The Report The report – officially the “OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” – is 48 pages long, including its extensive footnotes. The premise prompting the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to research and report upon the situation in Xinjiang was the “increasing allegations” it began receiving “from various civil society groups that members of the Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority communities were missing or had disappeared” in Xinjiang. Indeed, the U.N. report finds that the “China Cables,” the “Xinjiang Papers,” the “Karakax List,” the “Urumqi Police Database,” and, most recently, the “Xinjiang Police Files,” most of which are now in the public domain, “are highly likely to be authentic and therefore could be credibly relied upon in support of other information.” Throughout the report, the authors are careful to tie its findings and interpretations to existing and established principles already codified in international law. And I can tell you that the principle of Do No Harm applies just as much to the responsibility of political leadership as it does to the discipline of medicine.” In the end, Bachelet must have realized that sparing the face of the Chinese leadership by quashing the report would violate her own stated basic principle of political leadership, “Do No Harm.” Smothering the report and preventing a public viewing would irrevocably further harm the victims of China’s genocidal campaign against the Muslim minorities of Xinjiang, by denying them the international validation that their dehumanizing and deadly experiences had occurred.