The human rights situation in Xinjiang became an issue of acrimonious debate at the 51st regular session of the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council, with China nixing a draft decision sponsored by the United States of America and its allies to hold a debate on the human rights situation in Xinjiang. The draft had asked the HRC to debate a recent report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights assessing the “human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), People’s Republic of China”.
Banking on a wide variety of sources, including official ones, the testimonies of witnesses/victims and media reports, the OHCHR report, which was released on August 31, underlined the demographic change in XUAR: “as in 1953, at the time of the first census, over 75 per cent of the total population in the region was constituted by Uyghurs, who are predominantly Sunni Muslim, with ethnic Han Chinese accounting for seven per cent..Uyghur population now constitutes about 45 per cent of the region’s total and Han Chinese about 42 per cent.” The OHCHR mentioned that “these shifts appear to be largely the consequence of ethnic Han migration into the western regions, including as a result of incentives provided by Government policies.” Accompanied by recommendations, the report further said that “serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR in the context of the Government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies”.
At the forty-seven-member HRC, seventeen countries, including Japan and South Korea, voted in favour of holding a debate on Xinjiang in March 2023, whereas nineteen voted against it. There were eleven abstentions. A few days later, India, which abstained, underlined that the human rights of the people of Xinjiang should be “respected and guaranteed”. Twelve out of seventeen Organisation of Islamic Cooperation member states voted against holding a debate, including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Four of the OIC member states, including Malaysia, abstained. Within the OIC, only Somalia voted in favour of holding the debate.
While China tried to frame the HRC vote as a “victory for developing countries and a victory for truth and justice”, the practical reality is that the past patterns of voting defy such binary conclusions. The US, which is often an avid sponsor or co-sponsor of such human rights-related discussions or resolutions, has often expended its diplomatic capital to support Israel against such resolutions. In 2018, the Donald Trump administration had withdrawn from the Council on the charge that the HRC is biased against Israel. In October 2021, the US returned to the HRC as re-joining was one of the main foreign policy campaign planks of President Joe Biden.
While India’s stance at the HRC in favour of abstaining has been a subject of debate in the light of China’s 2020 aggression in Ladakh, it may be remembered that in March 1994, China, along with the Islamic Republic of Iran, bailed India out when Pakistan moved a resolution at the HRC for the sending of a fact-finding mission to Jammu and Kashmir. With a much weaker political and economic heft, India had fielded its top political — from the Opposition and the ruling parties — and diplomatic talents, including the former prime ministers, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, the former chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, and India’s permanent representative to the UN headquarters, Hamid Ansari.
India’s own voting record at the HRC defies binaries and is a consequence of numerous variables, including domestic political compulsions. Sri Lanka-related HRC resolutions after the end of the civil war are a reflection of this. In 2012 and 2013, in response to domestic political compulsions, India had voted in favour of the US-sponsored resolutions that criticised the Mahinda Rajapaksa government. Likewise, the only OIC member state, Somalia, which voted in favour of holding the debate on the human rights situation in Xinjiang, deferred to its own regional interests when it voted against extending the mandate of the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea this year.
The OHCHR has an advocacy mandate that enables sufficient autonomy to the high commissioner to express preemptive concerns on a particular issue through the lens of human rights. This is not the first time that the high commissioner has ruffled the feathers of the great powers. During his last few days in office, the former high commissioner, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, earned the wrath of the Trump administration for being vocal against the travel bans against the citizens of Muslim-majority countries and the US border policy of separating migrant children from parents. Specifically, the OHCHR report on Xinjiang carries reputational risks for China, as the report recommends to “the business community to take all possible measures to meet the responsibility to respect human rights across activities and business relationships as set out in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights”.
China is hyper-sensitive about any discussion on Xinjiang, which has been at a crossroads of various cultures and ethnicities. It has tried to frame the situation in the context of violent religious extremism. China had even hosted a visit of the senior leadership of the UN Counter-Terrorism Office to Beijing and Xinjiang. China has reportedly maintained that its counter-terrorism and ‘de-radicalisation efforts’ in the region had been conducted according to the rule of law and by no means add up to the suppression of ethnic minorities.
In broader reality, the HRC voting pattern is primarily a reflection of many factors, including the context in which each member state is placed. The acuity and accuracy of multilateral reports are underpinned by a host of factors, such as available granular regional expertise and access to credible sources of information. Irrespective of the HRC vote that took place in the background of China’s $18 trillion (USD) economy and its rising geopolitical influence and assertion, the release of the long-delayed OHCHR report on Xinjiang is significant as it may trigger greater global appetite to know about the subject in its wider dimensions outside niche circles.
Luv Puri is the author of two books on Jammu and Kashmir, including Across the LoC
