Save Uyghur detests new move to add China onto UN Human Rights Panel

On Wednesday, China was appointed to a panel where it will play a key role in selecting U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigators charged with monitoring human rights, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and abuses of basic freedoms. This move has sparked outrage amongst rights activists and politicians, including seven Senators who wrote a letter opposing the appointment.

Save Uyghur thanks Senators John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, James M Inhofe, Martha McSally, Kevin Kramer, Marco Rubio, and Marsha Blackburn for expressing their opposition to such a move.

“We write to express our profound disappointment and opposition to the appointment of Jiang Duan, Minister of Chinese Mission in Geneva to the UN Human Rights Council Consultative Group. As you know in this position, Jiang will provide China with the opportunity to play a central role in picking at least 17 human rights investigators, including those who look at freedom of speech, enforced disappearance, and arbitrary detention, rights abuses which the Chinese regime routinely perpetrates, the letter said. It also said that the Chinese government’s decision to ‘deceive the international community about the grave dangers of initial 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan’ violates any credibility on human rights and “should disqualify them from a position on human rights council consultative group”.

“In addition to its wilful deceit and gross negligence of COVID-19 outbreak, China is guilty of widespread and well-documented cases of human rights targeting the Uyghur Muslim community,” it added.

Dolkun Isa, president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) exile group, citing China’s incarceration of up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, said putting China on the panel was “like appointing a wolf to protect sheep.”

“In order to deflect international condemnation and cover up its crimes against humanity in East Turkestan, China has been aggressively manipulating the United Nations mechanisms and monopolizing important position to promote its disinformation and propaganda campaigns,” he added.

Read more here.

ACTION ITEM — JOIN TWITTER STORM ON 4/16/2020 12-2pm EST!

Through this Twitterstorm we aim to educate and raise awareness of many who are not informed of this move at the United Nations and highlight China’s atrocious record.

We the people which the UN and all it’s bodies serve veto this decision.

We aim to collect the tweets that are aimed to each mission and Ambassador of the Asians Pacific group and ASEAN countries and mail them to them.

We have a newsletter that we send to the UN missions in NY and we will include the online outrage and all reports/statements issued during this Twitterstorm and include them in our newsletter.

We want activists at large to watch Jiang Duan of the Chinese Mission in Geneva. We will all watch the candidate recommendations for UN human rights experts that China makes especially to fill positions according to the mandates of the Special Procedures, the Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Expert Mechanism on the Right of Development.

We will focus our advocacy on countries like Oman who presented the nomination.

We will keep targeting 53 Member States of Asian- Pacific Group as well nonaligned countries and the ten members of ASEAN.

Access twitterstorm toolkit here: https://www.saveuighur.org/vetochinaun-twitterstorm-toolkit/