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. She was certainly well qualified for the job: As a 23-year-old, she and her mother had been forced to flee their native Chile after detention and torture by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Bachelet’s father died at the hands of the same regime.

Almost immediately after taking up her new U.N. post, however, Bachelet was faced squarely with growing evidence of, and outrage over, China’s detention of up to a million people in prison camps based solely on their ethnicity and religious affiliation – which, according to China, amounted to their potential to be terrorists. The detainees identified were primarily ethnic Uyghur Muslims and other Muslim minorities of Xinjiang in China’s far northwest. Calls for the United Nations to investigate and intervene landed directly onto Bachelet’s desk.

Over the next few years, Bachelet was criticized in the press, often harshly, for ostensibly dragging her feet on issuing a condemnation of China’s human rights violations. There were those who doubted whether she would, in fact, make her office’s findings public at all, or whether she would submit to the heavy pressure that China is said to have applied throughout the United Nations to keep any report from ever reaching the public domain.

Hamstrung by COVID-19 restrictions, as well as by an uncooperative China, Bachelet did not make a fact-finding trip to Xinjiang until May 2022. After doing so, she continued to receive public criticism.

Amnesty International’s secretary general wrote in June 2022 that “Michelle Bachelet now has just two-and-a-half months to address her failures on China. Her refusal to call out the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity in Xinjiang… has betrayed countless victims and survivors. Michelle Bachelet’s failure to stand up to political pressure from China will be a major part of her legacy.”

A few minutes before midnight on Bachelet’s last day as high commissioner, August 31, 2022, she released the report.

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. For a subject matter of its size, complexity, and impact, one could have imagined a much longer document.

The report is mostly free of hyperbole, allowing the power of the facts themselves to dramatize the story of what steps the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership of China has taken to curtail the alleged threat of “extremism” and “terror” from the Muslim minorities who live throughout the vast expanse of Xinjiang.

The premise prompting the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 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.

In addition, “In 2018, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances reported a ‘dramatic’ increase in cases” as “re-education” camps were introduced throughout Xinjiang.

The findings and conclusions of the report draw not only from the research and interviews done by Bachelet’s office, but also from well-respected sources and documentation that are in the public domain. Therefore, a significant outcome of the report is that it validates and gives the highest credence to the authenticity of much of the outside research already done on the situation in Xinjiang, as well as to many of the substantial files that have been leaked to the press.

China openly disputes the work of Western researchers and media on its human rights record, accusing them of wishing to damage or even destroy China, in particular the Chinese Communist Party. With the United Nations now adding legitimacy to the work of many of those researchers, however, China’s allegations of confirmation bias – using research to confirm a predetermined premise – are weakened, if not completely diminished.

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. Such is the case in the description of what China calls “Vocational Education and Training Centers” (VETCs), which have dominated headlines around the world since news of their existence broke. “International human rights law requires deprivations of liberty not to be arbitrary,” the U.N. report states.  The operations of the “training centers” are assessed from this perspective.

First, the U.N. found that “without any apparent legal basis,” people were deprived of their liberty while detained in the VETCs.

Second, the grounds used by Chinese leadership to force Uyghurs and others into the centers include behaviors that are not only legal but that are also simply “the exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms.”

As evidence, the report cites a document that the U.N. believes is “highly likely” to be authentic, in which the reasons for detentions in one district in Xinjiang are spelled out. Known as the Karakax List, it is named for a county in southwestern Xinjiang, on the edge of the Tarim Basin. The file is actually a spreadsheet, and details the “innocuous” reasons that over 300 people were arbitrarily detained and delivered to VETC facilities. These reasons included having too many children, being an “unsafe” person, having been born in certain years, wearing a veil or beard, and having applied for a passport but not yet having left the country.

It is important to recognize that these arbitrary causes for detention as detailed in the Karakax List were later amplified in their authenticity by the much larger databases ultimately disclosed in May 2022, now known as the Xinjiang Police Files.

With no due process apparent in the process of detention, which the U.N. found is an “acute” risk, detainees also “do not appear to have access to lawyers.” Nor do they learn how long they would be held, nor under what conditions they can secure their release.

The U.N. report ultimately finds that “...[i]t is reasonable to conclude that a pattern of large-scale arbitrary detention occurred in VETC facilities, at least during 2017 to 2019, affecting a significant proportion of the Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority community” in Xinjiang.

The VETC facilities were not the only target of the U.N. report. It notes that the criminal justice system in Xinjiang has also seen a dramatic rise in arrests and lengthy prison sentences. Prisons themselves have both been expanded and newly built. The report notes that “China has in general a 99.9 per cent conviction rate in criminal cases.”

Stark language describes the treatment reported by two-thirds of the 26 former detainees interviewed directly by OHCHR. They report having been beaten with batons, “including electric batons while strapped in a so-called ‘tiger chair.’” Detainees describe being questioned “with water being poured in their faces,” being forced into long periods of solitary confinement, and having to sit without moving on small stools for long periods of time.

Those detained also detailed conditions of inhumane treatment during life under “re-education.” Some were shackled. They lost weight, and were in “constant hunger.” They were always under watch and became sleep-deprived due to the constant bright lights in what the report calls their “dorms/cells.” Some detainees were given injections and pills, leaving them feeling “drowsy.”

Just as disturbing, sexual violence, humiliation, and rape was reported to the U.N. interviewers.  With several former detainees describing their experience as psychological torture, the report concludes that the evidence shows “patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” as well as other violations including that of the right to health.

The Impact of Michelle Bachelet

The report, while damning on its own, is even more remarkable for the fact that Michelle Bachelet, as chief architect of the report, is responsible for its content and conclusions. Bachelet is a devout and devoted socialist. In 1975, when she and her mother fled their homeland, they sought refuge in East Germany, thanks to an arrangement made by the Socialist Party in Santiago with the erstwhile state’s communist government.

Leftist politicians around the world, but especially in Latin America, have a long history of hewing close to the Chinese Communist Party, politically and ideologically. It would be natural if Bachelet, as a committed socialist, had been at least sympathetic to China’s political system. If so, that leaning does not come through in the final product of the report. On the contrary, through this report Bachelet becomes China’s biggest and arguably most meaningful critic.

She also, as a survivor of arbitrary detention and torture herself, becomes the symbolic witness and voice of the victims of China’s illegal detentions and tortures. Despite the repeated delays in the report’s release, she does not appear to have let any bias she may have had in China’s favor interfere with the truth as she and her researchers found it.

In 2012, Bachelet gave a speech at the Australian National University in which she reflected on lessons learned from her own experience of a dictatorial government: “When I returned home from exile, I finished my medical degree and worked for years as a pediatrician. 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. Covering up the report, or perhaps even worse, diluting and diminishing the impact of its findings, would also harm future generations of Uyghurs and their minority Muslim compatriots if and when China attempts to restore the program of “re-education” to its previous strength.

The fact that Bachelet issued this quietly scathing report of major human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government against a largely defenseless group of minorities gives it even more gravitas. The Chinese government certainly never wanted this report made public. But if it were to come out, they most especially did not want Michelle Bachelet to be the person who exposed it.

In the end, it is no wonder that the Chinese government lobbied so hard to hush it all up.