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.

China's Final Solution

U.S. to co-host event at U.N. on China's treatment of Uighurs

Reuters

One of numerous Chinese concentration camps in East Turkestan.

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States will co-host an event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on China's treatment of Muslim minorities including ethnic Uighurs, the U.S. State Department said in a statement on Monday.
The event on Tuesday will be hosted by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan and will feature personal stories of victims, the statement said. 

It did not identify other hosts.
"China’s repression campaign includes, among other abuses, the mass detention of more than one million individuals in internment camps since April 2017," the State Department said.
U.N. experts and activists say at least 1 million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups have been detained in massive concentration camps in the remote East Turkestan colony. 

Beijing describes complexes in East Turkestan as "vocational training centers" helping to give people new skills.
Washington has been weighing how to confront China on the issue at the annual gathering of world leaders in New York this week. 

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged all countries in the world to resist China's demands to repatriate Uighurs.
Pompeo said Beijing's campaign in the western Chinese colony of East Turkestan was an "attempt to erase its own citizens."
Pompeo and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence could also address China's treatment of the Uighurs at events this week, but a final decision on any U.S. remarks "is expected to hinge on how the trade issue is going," an administration official said last week. 

China and the United States are fighting a trade war and are set to resume trade talks in October. 

Dishonorable Conduct

Greece blocks EU statement on China human rights at U.N.
By Robin Emmott and Angeliki Koutantou | BRUSSELS/ATHENS

Greece has blocked a European Union statement at the United Nations criticizing China's human rights record, a decision EU diplomats said undermined efforts to confront Beijing's crackdown on activists and dissidents.
The EU, which seeks to promote free speech and end capital punishment around the world, was due to make its statement last week at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, but failed to win the necessary agreement from all 28 EU states.
It marked the first time the EU had failed to make its statement at the U.N.'s top rights body, rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said.
A Greek foreign ministry official said Athens blocked the statement, calling it "unconstructive criticism of China" and said separate EU talks with China outside the U.N. were a better avenue for discussions.
An EU official confirmed the statement had been blocked.
Presented three times a year, the statement gives the EU a way to highlight abuses by states around the world on issues that other countries are unwilling to raise.
The impasse is the latest blow to the EU's credentials as a defender of human rights, three diplomats said, and raises questions about the economically powerful EU's "soft power" that relies on inspiring countries to follow its example by outlawing the death penalty and upholding press freedoms.
It also underscores the EU's awkward ties with China, its second-largest trade partner, diplomats said.
Brussels has welcomed Beijing as an ally against Donald Trump in the fight against climate change and trade protectionism. 

But as business ties grow, the bloc is struggling to speak out against a Chinese government crackdown on human rights lawyers and other activists since 2015.
China's COSCO Shipping, owner of the world's fourth-largest container fleet, took a 51 percent stake in Greece's largest port last year.
Hungary, another large recipient of Chinese investment, has repeatedly blocked EU statements criticizing China's rights record under Xi Jinping, diplomats said.
One EU diplomat expressed frustration that Greece's decision to block the statement came at the same time the International Monetary Fund and EU governments agreed to release funds under Greece's emergency financial bailout last week in Luxembourg.
"It was dishonorable, to say the least," the diplomat said.