UN rights chief to visit China’s Xinjiang in May

UN rights chief to visit China’s Xinjiang in May

GENEVA: The UN rights chief said yesterday she would make a long-delayed visit to China in May, including to Xinjiang, where Western lawmakers have accused Beijing of genocide. “I am pleased to announce that we have recently reached an agreement with the government of China for a visit,” Michelle Bachelet told the UN Human Rights Council. She said that the UN rights agency, OHCHR, and Beijing had “initiated concrete preparations for a visit that is foreseen to take place in May.”

There have long been calls for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Xinjiang. Rights groups say that at least one million mostly Muslim minorities have been incarcerated in “re-education camps” in Xinjiang, a far-western region where China is accused of widespread human rights abuses including forced sterilisations of women and forced labour. The US government and lawmakers in five other Western countries have declared China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang a “genocide” — a charge denied by Beijing. China says it is running vocational training centres in the region designed to counter extremism.

‘Unfettered access’

The Chinese government has for years said that Bachelet was welcome to visit Xinjiang, but an agreement on her demand for “meaningful and unfettered access” has until