Global Insight assesses how the UN, lawyers and the families of those affected are keeping the plight of the Uyghur community and others in Xinjiang under the spotlight.

Six years. That’s how long Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur activist in the US, has been searching for her sister, Gulshan, who disappeared in China.

Abbas believes this disappearance was in retaliation for her own activism, which has drawn attention to China’s human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic ethnic group.

After years of Abbas campaigning for her sister, in August China finally issued a formal statement – a response to a letter sent two months prior by UN special rapporteurs seeking information about Gulshan’s whereabouts and health status. Chinese authorities replied that Gulshan, a 62-year-old retired doctor, was serving a 20-year sentence through 2038 in a women’s prison ‘for the crimes of participating in a terrorist organization’.

‘I’m happy to hear that she is alive’, says Abbas. ‘But at the same time, I feel frustration and furiousness. Gulshan is an innocent person, an entirely non-political person who never participated in any activism. But based on these fabricated, false charges, she’s suffering.’

Experts say that any information about Gulshan would probably not have been provided without pressure via UN mechanisms. But her case is one of many more – and it remains that she was imprisoned on what Abbas asserts are spurious charges.

The UN versus China

Broadly speaking, UN scrutiny in recent years in respect of China’s human rights record hasn’t led to the sweeping impact that Abbas and many Uyghurs, as well as human rights defenders, have hoped would materialise.

In terms of ‘changes on the ground [in China], it’s not what we want to see at all’, says Angeli Datt, an independent researcher who focuses on human rights issues in China. ‘We don’t want people to be arbitrarily detained and disappeared; we want them to be able to speak to their families, move freely, to exercise freedom of expression.’

After Beijing launched its ‘Strike Hard’ crackdown in 2014, ostensibly against ‘terrorism’, upwards of a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic, mostly Muslim, groups were forced into ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang, a far western region in China.

Many people, such as Gulshan Abbas, were given lengthy prison sentences over questionable charges, such as praying and fasting. Some were forced into labour, tainting global supply chains involving major brands from car makers to clothing manufacturers.

Details of the abuse that Uyghurs experienced came to public attention via advocacy campaigns and journalistic investigations. Portions of leaked Chinese police files and court documents confirmed those accounts, prompting foreign governments and international bodies, such as the UN, to weigh in.

The most recent public statement from the UN came in August, when the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights again called for allegations of human rights violations to be ‘fully investigated’. The Office’s statement read that, ‘on Xinjiang, we understand that many problematic laws and policies remain in place, and we have called again on the authorities to undertake a full review’. Still, there remain ‘difficulties posed by limited access to information and the fear of reprisals against individuals who engage with the United Nations’, the statement added.

The update came on the two-year anniversary of a landmark UN report, released in 2022, which found that China’s actions ‘may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity’. That report also called for an independent investigation, which China has repeatedly blocked. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have continued to push back on the findings, calling them ‘completely illegal, null and void’.

An independent investigation would allow China ‘to exonerate itself in front of the international community’, says Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer who advocates on the Uyghur issue. But ‘they haven’t done that, because they know they have a lot to hide from international scrutiny’.

According to Asat, the UN’s August statement summarised ‘how unwilling China remains in its cooperation with the UN system, as it has offered limited access to the region and to the victims, to the people in the prisons’. Even when Michelle Bachelet, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, visited Xinjiang in spring 2022, the Chinese government went to extreme lengths to curb and ‘sanitise’ what she could do and see. All of this shows how much sway China can have at the UN, and over member states – what Asat describes as ‘institutional capture’.

Two months after the initial UN report was released, the UN Human Rights Council considered a motion to debate China’s human rights record against the Uyghurs and other Muslims. It was the first time that the human rights record of China – a powerful permanent member of the UN Security Council – had been on the agenda of the UN’s human rights body. But the motion was voted down – 19 against, 17 for and 11 abstentions – in only the second time in the 16-year history of the UN Human Rights Council that a motion has been rejected.

China had been campaigning behind the scenes, asking many countries to vote against the motion, says Rushan Abbas. Even ‘Ukraine abstained – this was frustrating for us’, she says. The result was a victory for Beijing, denting accountability efforts and hurting the credibility of the UN Human Rights Council.

The UN has ‘a description of everything we have been saying out loud for years, all these crimes, and yet they have not done anything these last two years’, says Abbas. In Datt’s view, while the UN ‘doesn’t have any teeth – they can’t force China to do anything […] if the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is making noise about this, that means the Chinese government can’t brush it under the rug the way it wants’.

Indeed, China’s public statements have evolved over the years on the Uyghur issue from outright denials of ‘re-education’ camps, disappearances and detentions, to acknowledging facilities existed – though the government cast them as ‘vocational training centres’.

China also highlighted its use of prison sentences, claiming that any country would put criminals behind bars. The issue, however, is that China’s legal and judicial system is very opaque, and circumstances typically don’t allow for fair trials. The country has a 99.9 per cent conviction rate. ‘The Chinese state is now the extreme manifestation of “authoritarian legality,” where the laws are deployed to legitimise its human rights abuses,’ says Asat.

Pressure points

Asat and other advocates are now pressing for the 13 recommendations in the 2022 UN report to be implemented. To begin with, there’s a need to ‘activate all accountability mechanisms to compel China to free all innocent individuals’, as Asat wrote in a working paper for the Yale MacMillan Center, published in August.

Secondly, another recommendation calls for families to receive information regarding the whereabouts of their relatives and the establishment of safe channels of communication and travel so that relatives can reunite. Other report recommendations include unrestricted visits by UN officials and ensuring that national security and surveillance policies don’t infringe on individual human rights.

Ultimately, ‘the Chinese government is the entity that can make change on the ground’, says Datt. ‘So, any kind of change, in theory, usually relies on generating public awareness amongst the media and other governments, and that awareness puts pressure on the entity to change.’

Growing awareness paved the way for one landmark legal case to begin in Argentina, where a group of Uyghurs brought a lawsuit in 2022 against Chinese officials in regard to allegations of human rights abuses, including genocide and crimes against humanity. Courts in Argentina have universal jurisdiction, which has allowed for unique international human rights cases to be heard there. The lawsuit has been in limbo, however, with Argentine courts at varying levels deliberating on whether to officially open a case. China denies such allegations.

Protests continue to crop up in cities around the world, from Istanbul to Washington, DC, with Uyghurs gathering at Chinese embassies and consulates to demand information about loved ones who have been disappeared by the state. ‘We owe it to the Uyghur community to keep scrutinising China’s human rights violations, knowing that there are more arrests happening’, says Asat. ‘China is getting more sophisticated with its information censorship, and I don’t want the world to move on, because none of the Uyghur families are able to move on.’

Sophia Yan is a senior foreign correspondent at The Telegraph, based in Istanbul. 

Murad Sezer/Reuters