The re-election of China and Pakistan to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) amid opposition from rights groups drew condemnation from across the world on Wednesday.
While China won a seat at the UNHRC by a small margin on Tuesday, Pakistan, ironically, received the highest number of votes among five candidates from the Asia-Pacific region.
Rebuking the UN Human Rights Council over the election of China, Russia and Cuba as its members, the US on Wednesday said its stand to withdraw from the council two years ago, has been vindicated. “The election of China, Russia, and Cuba to the UN Human Rights Council validates the US’ decision to withdraw from the Council in 2018 and use other venues to protect and promote universal human rights. At UNGA this year, we did just that,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted.
China’s got elected to the UNHRC despite the fact that the UN experts earlier this year called on the international community to take collective and decisive action to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime ends violations of its international obligations and human rights of its citizens.
In a statement issued by the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR), the experts, who are part of the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, had said that it is time for renewed attention on the human rights situation in China, particularly in light of the moves against the people of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), minorities of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, the Tibet Autonomous Region, and human rights defenders across the country. They had urged the UNHRC to act with a sense of urgency to take all appropriate measures to monitor Chinese human rights practices.
Reacting to the news, India’s top foreign policy expert Brahma Chellany tweeted, “China, despite incarcerating more than a million Muslims, unleashing harsh repression in Tibet and killing detainees to harvest their organs for transplant, wins a UN Human Rights Council seat. It secures 30 votes less than its proxy, Pakistan. The Council is becoming irrelevant.”
In a scathing commentary, Pakistan’s own human rights commission earlier this year had expressed deep concerns about the state of human rights of ethnic minorities in the country. In its annual report, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said, “The year 2019 will be remembered for the systematic curbing of political dissent by various means, constraints to the freedom of the mainstream media, digital surveillance, and the over-regulation of social media spaces.”
Curbs on freedom of opinion and expression continued to escalate, the commission said pointing out that it had become “more difficult to speak or write openly — if at all — on ‘sensitive’ issues such as enforced disappearances, or to criticise state policy or security agencies in these areas” for journalists in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in particular.
With agency inputs