UN China trip: A foot in the door or human rights letdown?

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has unleashed a firestorm of criticism from rights advocates and scholars – and praise from China’s government – after stepping into the gaping divide over human rights between authoritarian China and the liberal West.

Ms. Bachelet traveled to China late last month on the first visit by a U.N. human rights commissioner in nearly two decades. Her visit to a region known for abuses against minority groups, and her end-of-trip remarks echoing Chinese state rhetoric, angered rights groups. Scores of organizations representing Uyghur and Tibetan ethnic minorities and Hong Kongers have called on Ms. Bachelet to resign, accusing her of “whitewashing” abuses and “squandering” an opportunity to hold Beijing accountable during her trip to China, including the northwestern region of Xinjiang. 

China’s government, meanwhile, has hailed the visit for highlighting China’s human rights achievements. It afforded an opportunity for Ms. Bachelet to “observe and experience firsthand a real Xinjiang,” said Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu, denouncing as “palpable lies” the charges of rights violations in the region.

On Monday, in her annual report before the 50th Human Rights Council session in Geneva, Ms. Bachelet seemingly tried to adjust course, toughening her language on China. She pointed to “human rights violations” impacting ethnic and religious minorities, and raised concerns about the human rights of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, “including broad arbitrary detention and patterns of abuse” in detention facilities. She also announced that she will not be seeking a second term as high commissioner.

The controversy sparked by Ms. Bachelet’s trip has brought into sharp relief China’s efforts to blunt criticism of its record and advance its own, state-centric global rights agenda, in contrast with universal human rights principles endorsed by the United Nations, experts say.

“China has really got the bit between its teeth on … human rights,” says Rosemary Foot, author of “China, the UN, and Human Protection: Beliefs, Power, Image.” “It’s much bolder [than it used to be] in challenging ideas of universality and indivisibility of human rights. It’s bolder in the Human Rights Council.” China has strained relations with the Council, narrowly winning reelection in 2020.

Starting the conversation

Beijing is advancing an alternative model of human rights that prioritizes a strong, sovereign state, economic development, and security, whereas the U.N. focuses on protecting individual rights, Dr. Foot says. The challenge for Ms. Bachelet, therefore, was how to engage productively with China’s leadership, while also upholding the integrity of the U.N. mission.

Ms. Bachelet said the main achievement of her trip – the first in 17 years by a U.N. high commissioner for human rights – was to open up a structure for regular discussions between the U.N. human rights office and China’s government, and to create a working group to “facilitate substantive exchanges and cooperation.”

“The visit was an opportunity to hold direct discussions – with China’s most senior leaders – on human rights … and pave the way for more regular, meaningful interactions in the future,” Ms. Bachelet told a press conference on May 28, the last day of her six-day China trip.

To be sure, some experts stressed that it is imperative for the top U.N. human rights official to engage with China’s government, and called her meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping an accomplishment.

Yet in pursuing this long-term outreach with Beijing, others say Ms. Bachelet appeared to veer too far toward endorsing China’s framing of human rights, rather than upholding independent U.N. values.

“Maybe she thinks getting a foot in the door is more important than actually saying the right things,” says Dr. Foot, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations. But, she says, public statements are “really important in human rights accountability, and my fear is all these other things will be behind closed doors and not really productive at all.”

Missed opportunity in Xinjiang

Traveling inside what she called a “bubble” of government COVID-19 restrictions, Ms. Bachelet made clear she was not in China to investigate charges of rights abuses in Xinjiang or elsewhere. Yet, although her movements were controlled, she did have a high-profile opportunity to give voice to human rights concerns raised by U.N. bodies and nongovernmental organizations. 

Ms. Bachelet’s choice, instead, to echo the Chinese government’s framing of the problem in Xinjiang as counterterrorism, struck experts and rights advocates alike as at best a missed opportunity, and at worst a blow to her credibility.

“Violent acts of extremism have terrible, serious impact on the lives of victims, including those tasked to protect the community,” Ms. Bachelet said at the press conference in May. “But it is critical that counterterrorism responses do not result in human rights violations.”

In an open letter this week, dozens of prominent international scholars of Xinjiang said Ms. Bachelet’s remarks “ignored” a large body of evidence, including leaked and online Chinese documents, survivor testimony, and satellite imagery, showing that China has conducted a policy of extra-legal confinement and other abuses of Uyghurs and other primarily Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

“We were deeply disturbed,” the scholars wrote, explaining that Ms. Bachelet’s words “echo the Chinese state’s claim that their atrocities in Xinjiang are all part of a ‘counterterrorism’ effort, a claim that our research and the Chinese state’s own documents show to be false.” The letter noted that Ms. Bachelet also used the government phrase “vocational education and training center” to describe what human rights groups and independent investigators have documented as mass internment facilities.

The controversy has intensified pressure on the United Nations to release a major investigation into rights abuses in Xinjiang – a report it has withheld without explanation since last year. On Monday, Ms. Bachelet said the report in Xinjiang is “being updated” and will be shared with China’s government “for factual comment before publication.” 

Ms. Bachelet suggested the report would include evidence gathered inside and outside Xinjiang from “survivors and their family members and civil society representatives,” calling their information and perspectives “vital.”

“There is a strong cost to their credibility if a strong and detailed report doesn’t emerge from all of this,” says Philip Alston, who undertook an official mission to China in 2016 as a U.N. Human Rights Council special rapporteur and is now a professor at New York University’s law school.

“It’s important to reflect the sort of justifications that China offers for its policies,” he says. But “it’s then of the utmost importance to have a frank reckoning in terms of acknowledging the nature of the violations.”