Criminal Office

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Discloses Names of Chinese Dissidents to Beijing
BY EVA FU

The United Nations Human Rights Council on June 26, 2019. 

Emma Reilly, a UN employee who first alleged the practice in 2013, said in an Oct. 21 letter to senior U.S. diplomats and members of Congress, “The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) continues to provide China with advance information on whether named human rights defenders plan to attend meetings" in Geneva. 

A United Nations whistleblower has accused the organization’s human rights agency of endangering Chinese rights activists by disclosing their names to the Chinese regime.
“The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) apparently continues to provide China with advance information on whether named human rights defenders plan to attend meetings (in Geneva),” Emma Reilly, a human rights officer at the OHCHR, said in an Oct. 21 letter to U.S. congress members and senior officials, Fox News reported on Dec. 14.
The list of names provided to the Chinese authorities included Tibetan and Uyghur activists, some of whom are U.S. citizens or residents.
Reilly said that the practice has continued since 2013.

Reilly, an Irish and British dual national, also accused the organization of retaliating against her in response to the complaints.“Instead of taking action to stop names being handed over, the UN has focused its energy on retaliating against me for daring to report it. I have been ostracized, publicly defamed, deprived of functions, and my career has been left in tatters,” Reilly said.
She also said the UN approved of Beijing’s request for the name list even though it denied a similar request from Turkey.
According to Washington-based non-profit Government Accountability Project, Reilly first raised objections to the handover of dissidents’ names in early 2013 through an internal report. 

She said in response to an inquiry from the Chinese UN ambassador, she and other staff were instructed to provide information on whether 13 human rights activists were planning to attend a Human Rights Council session.
Reilly had also reported such practices to senior staff members and through other internal channels, but saw no immediate action from the organization until the Irish government intervened in 2016, the Government Accountability Project said.

OHCHR helped China arrest and kill Cao Shunli
The advocacy group further noted the disappearance of Chinese lawyer and activist Cao Shunli at a Beijing airport in September 2013, while Cao was on her way for a UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva. 

The arrest took place six months after Reilly’s first internal report. 

Cao died in detention in China six months later after being denied medical treatment.
Reilly had suffered from a range of reprisals due to her speaking up, including being discriminated for promotion, excluded from meetings, and receiving prejudicial performance evaluations.
Responding to Gomez’s comments, Reilly said that the UN has “consistently refused to act” on her request to “stop this horrific practice.”
“When Chinese dissidents come to the UN to speak out about human rights abuses, the last thing they expect is for the UN to report them to China,” she said.

Chinese Influence at the UN
Concerns over the Chinese regime’s influence at the United Nations Human Rights Council have been mounting in recent years.
In July, the Chinese delegate twice interrupted Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho during her testimony at the council, during which she appealed to the UN to remove China from the organization and speak up for Hong Kong, a city embroiled in protests since June in opposition to growing political interference from Beijing.
In November 2018, eight non-profit groups in a joint statement expressed concerns after the United Nations Human Rights Council removed at least seven of their submissions in a report for consideration by UN member states ahead of a review of Beijing’s human rights record. 

The groups voiced concern that the submissions were objected to by the Chinese Communist Party.
In April 2017, security officials at the UN headquarters in New York expelled a prominent Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa from the premise without explanation. 

Later in 2018, the former Under-Secretary-General for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Wu Hongbo, revealed in an interview with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV that he had personally ordered the activist’s expulsion.
“As a Chinese diplomat, we can’t be a bit careless when it comes to issues relating to China’s national sovereignty and national interests,” Wu said at the time.
The Chinese regime has detained an estimated more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan in a massive campaign to combat purported “extremism.”

In January 2017, ahead of a keynote speech from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping at the UN European headquarters in Geneva, UN officials deployed rare stringent security arrangements, shutting down parking lots and meeting rooms, and sending home early its roughly 3,000 staff members. 

Small pro-Tibet protests near the site were also declared unauthorized.
Ted Piccone, senior fellow at Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution, warned that the Chinese regime is “playing the long game” in regards to human rights and reshaping the international system to its advantage.
“Without a well thought out and long-term counter-balancing strategy, China’s growing economic leverage will probably allow it to achieve its objectives”—defending its “authoritarian system of one-party control” and exporting its values that undermine international human rights system, Piccone wrote in a 2018 report.
“The result would be a weaker international human rights system in which independent voices are muffled and public criticism of egregious abuses muted behind the banner of national sovereignty.”

China's crimes against humanity

U.N. urged to investigate monstrous live organ harvesting in China

By Emma Batha


LONDON -- A senior lawyer called on Tuesday for the top United Nations human rights body to investigate evidence that China is murdering members of the Falun Gong spiritual group and harvesting their organs for transplant.
Hamid Sabi called for urgent action as he presented the findings of the China Tribunal, an independent panel set up to examine the issue, which concluded in June that China’s organ harvesting amounted to crimes against humanity.
Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations by human rights researchers and scholars that it forcibly takes organs from prisoners of conscience and said it stopped using organs from executed prisoners in 2015.
But Sabi, Counsel to the China Tribunal, told the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that forced organ harvesting had been committed “for years throughout China on a significant scale ... and continues today”.
The harvesting has involved “hundreds of thousands of victims”, mainly practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, he said, adding that detainees from China’s ethnic Uighur minority were also targeted.
“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said.
“Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph. But killing the donor is criminal.”
Falun Gong is a spiritual group based around meditation that China banned 20 years ago after 10,000 members appeared at the central leadership compound in Beijing in silent protest. 

Thousands of members have since been jailed.
Geoffrey Nice, the tribunal’s chairman, told a separate U.N. event on the issue that governments, U.N. bodies and those involved with transplant surgery, could no longer turn a blind eye to the “inconvenient” evidence.
Nice, who was lead prosecutor in the trial of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, said the tribunal’s findings required immediate action.
“The time of convenient ‘uncertainty’, when all these entities could say the case against (China) was not proved, is past.”
Transplant recipients in China include Chinese nationals as well as overseas patients who travel to China in order to receive an organ at a substantial cost, but with a greatly reduced waiting time.
The tribunal said in June its findings were “indicative” of genocide, but it had not been clear enough to make a positive ruling.

UN: China Responds to Rights Review with Threats

Member States Should Seek International Inquiry into Widescale Chinese Abuses

Human Rights Watch

Atushi city concentration camp in East Turkestan

Geneva – China used pressure and warnings to stifle criticism of its poor human rights record throughout the United Nations Human Rights Council session that concluded on March 22, 2019, in Geneva, Human Rights Watch said today. 

China provided no credible response to concerns raised about the government’s rights violations, notably the mass arbitrary detention of an estimated one million Turkic Muslims in China’s East Turkestan colony.
“For years China has worked behind the scenes to weaken UN human rights mechanisms,” said John Fisher, Geneva director. 

“But the growing global outcry over its mistreatment of East Turkestan’s Muslims has sent China into panic mode, using public as well as private pressure to block concerted international action.”
A letter sent by China to ambassadors in Geneva, which Human Rights Watch obtained, warns delegations that “in the interest of our bilateral relations and continued multilateral cooperation,” they should not “co-sponsor, participate in or be present at” a panel event on March 13 on human rights violations in East Turkestan, hosted by the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. 

In addition, some delegates from the global South told Human Rights Watch that Chinese diplomats had personally approached them and warned them not to attend the event.
China’s rights record was under formal scrutiny at this session as the Human Rights Council considered the report of China’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a regular review of the rights record of each UN member state. 

Delegates attending the session identified a number of concerns about China’s efforts to mute criticism and to present a distorted account of its rights record, including:

• Pressuring UN officials to remove the UN country team and certain nongovernmental organization submissions from UPR materials;
• Providing blatantly false or misleading responses on critical issues, such as on violations of religious freedom; mass detention centers, and lack of due process safeguards in East Turkestan;
• Urging delegations to sign up for the UPR to praise China’s rights record;
• Approaching delegations that criticized China’s rights record to warn of negative consequences to their bilateral relationship;
• Prevailing upon member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to commend China for its treatment of its Muslim population;
• Flooding speaker lists with government-organized nongovernmental organizations (GONGOs) to uncritically endorse China’s rights record, while not allowing any opportunity for independent China groups to participate in any government consultation or make submissions without fear of reprisals;
• Seeking to block accreditation of a Uyghur activist, Dolkun Isa, and publicly denouncing him without basis as a “terrorist” during an event held by a nongovernmental group, and denouncing a Uyghur panelist at the state-led side event, ominously citing details of the whereabouts and status of his family members;
• Exhibiting a massive week-long photo display outside UN meeting rooms depicting Uyghurs as happy and grateful to the Chinese authorities; and
• Seeking to silence a nongovernmental group from speaking on East Turkestan at the council by raising points of order.

Despite China’s efforts to prevent criticism, numerous government delegations, the UN high commissioner for human rights, UN rights experts, treaty bodies, and many nongovernmental organizations have all drawn attention to China’s sweeping violations in East Turkestan and called for unfettered access for international monitors to conduct an independent assessment.
“It speaks volumes that China felt it necessary to twist arms and mount propaganda displays to try to suppress scrutiny of its rights record,” Fisher said. 

“Now it’s up to governments to take action at the June Council session and show that China is being held to international rights standards.”

European Union's Yellow Sheep

In Greece, China Finds an Ally Against Human Rights Criticism
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and SOMINI SENGUPTA

Uighur men praying at a grave in China’s Xinjiang Province. Greece blocked a European Union statement that would have condemned China’s violations of human rights, including those of Uighurs and Tibetans.

GENEVA — China has long won diplomatic allies in the world’s poor countries by helping them build expensive roads and ports. 

Now, it appears to have similarly won over a needy country in Europe.
At a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council this month in Geneva, the European Union sought to draw renewed attention to human rights abuses in China — only to be blocked by one of its member countries, Greece. 

A spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens called it “unproductive criticism.”
It was the first time that the European Union did not make a statement in the Human Rights Council regarding rights violations in specific countries, including China, which has a seat on the council. That silence was an embarrassing reversal for the 28-country bloc, which has prided itself on taking progressive positions on human rights on a council where some nations with poor human rights records habitually resist country-specific resolutions and examinations of their conduct.
Greece is increasingly courting Chinese trade and investment as it faces pressure from international creditors and a cold shoulder from its traditional rich allies in Europe. 

China’s largest shipping company, known as China COSCO Shipping, bought a majority stake last year in the Greek port of Piraeus. 

The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has visited China twice in two years. 

And China will be the “country of honor” at Greece’s annual international business fair in September in the port of Thessaloniki.

Greek ports are critical to China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, a huge infrastructure project across Asia, Africa and Europe. 

Just last week, at a concert of the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra in Piraeus, the Chinese ambassador to Greece hailed the cooperation between the two countries. 

“Greece and China will remain good friends in good and bad times, good partners for mutual progress,” said the envoy, Zou Xiaoli, according to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency.
China is seeking to expand its diplomatic influence worldwide, projecting itself as the chief proponent of international trade and cooperation as Trump stakes out an increasingly nationalist position for the United States. 

In the past month, the Chinese premier has made high-profile visits to Brussels, the European Union’s headquarters, and Berlin, the German capital.
After Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord this month, the European Union said it would work with China, the world’s largest polluter, to achieve the accord’s chief target: keeping global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. 

China could well take advantage of the European Union’s silence in Geneva.
In the last Human Rights Council session in March, the European Union statement pointed to China’s detention of lawyers and human rights defenders. 

The statement also criticized Russia for its crackdown on civil liberties and the Philippines for its targeted drug-related killings.

The trial of Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, was streamed online last month by the Changsha Intermediate People’s Court.

At the current Human Rights Council session, which ends this week, the European Union made no such statement on China because of Greek objections, European Union diplomats said.
“When the stability of a country is at stake, we need to be more constructive in the way we express our criticism,” a spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry said in a telephone interview, “because if the country collapses, there will be no human rights to protect.”
The spokesman, who requested anonymity because of diplomatic protocol in the country, added that was better to raise human rights issues in private meetings between diplomats from Brussels and Beijing.
It was an odd explanation, considering that China’s stability does not appear to be at risk. 

But in the face of the Greek objection, the European Union’s statement died on the vine.
“The global human rights agenda is best served when the E.U. speaks with one voice,” Maja Kocijancic, a spokeswoman for the European Union’s executive body, wrote Monday in an email.
“We will continue our work to bring all 28 together and hope it will, as we normally do, be possible to align positions” for the next session of the Human Rights Council later this year, she added.
Greece’s move to block the statement was first reported in The Guardian.
Human Rights Watch said it was “shameful that Greece sought to hold the E.U. hostage to prevent much-needed attention to China’s human rights crackdown.”
But it also said this was one of three occasions in the past three weeks when the bloc had “demonstrated no intention, compassion or strategic vision to stem the tide of human rights abuses in China.” 

It cited a summit meeting with Li Keqiang at the start of June and the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown as other recent occasions on which Europe had failed to forcefully condemn human rights abuses in China.
Diplomats in Geneva noted that Greece was not alone in arguing against the European Union’s statement to the council. 

Lengthy discussions in Brussels on the text of the statement failed to overcome Hungary’s objection to mentioning human rights concerns in Egypt.
After a tense emergency meeting of European ambassadors in Geneva just two hours before the Human Rights Council debate, Hungary relented and withdrew its objection, leaving Greece as the sole obstacle to consensus.

Cultural Genocide

U.N. Human Rights Experts Unite to Condemn China Over Expulsions of Tibetans
By EDWARD WONG

Buddhist monks at Larung Gar last year. A half-dozen United Nations experts have condemned the expulsions of monks and nuns from two Tibetan religious enclaves, Larung Gar and Yachen Gar.

A half-dozen United Nations experts who investigate human rights abuses have taken the rare step of banding together to condemn China for expulsions of monks and nuns from major religious enclaves in a Tibetan region.
In a sharply worded statement, the experts expressed alarm about “severe restrictions of religious freedom” in the area.
Most of the expulsions mentioned by the experts have taken place at Larung Gar, the world’s largest Buddhist institute and one of the most influential centers of learning in the Tibetan world. 

Officials have been demolishing some of the homes of the 20,000 monks and nuns living around the institute, in a high valley in Sichuan Province.
The statement also cited accusations of evictions at Yachen Gar, sometimes known as Yarchen Gar, an enclave largely of nuns that is also in Sichuan and has a population of about 10,000.
“While we do not wish to prejudge the accuracy of these allegations, grave concern is expressed over the serious repression of the Buddhist Tibetans’ cultural and religious practices and learning in Larung Gar and Yachen Gar,” the statement said.
It was signed by six of the United Nations experts, or special rapporteurs, who come from various countries. 

They each specialize in a single aspect of human rights, including cultural rights, sustainable environment and peaceful assembly. 

It is unusual for so many of them to collaborate in this manner.
The statement was sent to the Chinese government in November, but was made public only in recent days, before the start of this year’s session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. The session began Monday and is scheduled to end on March 24.
The United Nations experts have asked Beijing to address the reports of evictions and demolitions. The release of the statement before the session in Geneva puts more pressure on China to explain the actions taking place at the two Tibetan Buddhist institutions. 

China says matters related to Tibet are internal affairs, but Chinese officials in Beijing have privately expressed some concern over outside perceptions of the demolitions and evictions at Larung Gar and related Western news coverage.
Over the summer, Chinese officials began deporting monks and nuns living at Larung Gar who were not registered residents of Garze, the prefecture where the institution is. 

Since then, hundreds of clergy members have been forced out, and workers have demolished small homes clustered along the valley walls. 

One day last fall, I watched workers tearing and cutting apart wooden homes, sometimes using a chain saw.
Official reports have said the demolition is part of a project to improve safety in the area because people live in such tight quarters there. 

In 2014, a fire destroyed about 100 homes.
Residents said the government planned to bring the population down to 5,000 from 20,000 by next year. 

The government evicted many clergy members once before, in 2001, but people returned. 

The encampment was founded in 1980 near the town of Sertar by Jigme Phuntsok, a charismatic lama, and is now run by two abbots. 

The United Nations experts said in the statement that while they awaited China’s response, they “urge that all necessary interim measures be taken to halt the violations and prevent their reoccurrence.”