Question: US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price noted the other day the continued silence of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in the face of human rights violations in Xinjiang and throughout the PRC. He expressed deep concerns over her visit to China. He added, "we have no expectation that the PRC will grant the necessary access required to conduct a complete, unmanipulated assessment of the human rights environment in Xinjiang." British Ambassador to China Caroline Wilson posted on social media that she "stressed the importance of unfettered access to Xinjiang". "There is no excuse for preventing UN representatives from completing their investigations," she noted. What is China's comment on this?
Spokesperson: On the visit by the High Commissioner, the US, UK and other Western countries have put on one political farce after another lately. They have publicly exerted pressure and vehemently demanded a visit to China's Xinjiang by the High Commissioner for a so-called "investigation" into China under the presumption of guilt. After China and the OHCHR agreed on the arrangement for the High Commissioner's visit after consultation on an equal footing, the US and the UK again went to great lengths to disrupt and undercut the outcome, criticized the upcoming visit, and set various preconditions for and obstacles to the visit. The flip-flops with self-contradictions only bring humiliation to the countries themselves. Are they interested in human rights, or politicizing, weaponizing and instrumentalizing human rights issues?
It seems that countries like the US and the UK do not care about the truth at all. All they want is to whip up the so-called Xinjiang issue and discredit China with the High Commissioner's visit. What truly concerns them is that international observers including the High Commissioner can see the real situation in Xinjiang, which will debunk the lies they have made up and bankrupt their plot to contain China with Xinjiang-related issue.
In fact, the "lies of the century" to smear Xinjiang fabricated by forces with ulterior motives exactly mirror the deplorable track record of the US and the UK.
The US committed genocide against Native Americans by massacre, eviction, sterilization and coercive assimilation, reducing the population of Native Americans from five million in 1492 to 250,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.
The US has serious problems of human trafficking and forced labor. It still has not ratified the Forced Labour Convention (1930), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Nearly 100,000 people are smuggled into the US for forced labor every year. And there are at least half a million people enslaved in the US; and roughly 240,000 to 325,000 women and children in the US are victims of sexual slavery.
The US is also an old hand in arbitrary detention and abuse of torture. For years, in the name of its "war on terror", the CIA has set up black sites in at least 54 countries and regions where as many as 100,000 people are put under detention.
The British special forces brutally killed civilians in the military operations in Afghanistan. Islamophobia is rampant in the UK, with nearly half of the Muslim population believe that they are subject to discriminatory treatment of the government, and 46 percent of the people think that prejudice against Islam makes it hard for them to live in the UK.
The US and the UK should earnestly face up to and address their systemic and persistent human rights problems at home and give a responsible explanation to the world. The UN should make an objective assessment and deliver reports on the human rights issues in the US and the UK.
