The United Nations Human Rights Council reconvened this week. Also present: China, Pakistan, North Korea and Cuba. Which begs the question: What else are we doing in the UN?
What does a human rights officer do? Caring about improving human rights would be the obvious answer.
Three weeks ago, UN human rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet was in China. The timing could hardly have been more appropriate. At the same time as her visit, the international press reported extensively on the practices in the torture camps in which the Chinese government is holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs. The majority of Uyghurs belong to the Muslim faith group. That’s enough in China to be considered the subject best locked away.
Over the past few years, China has built the largest camp system since the end of the Gulag in Xinjiang Province. Until now, one had to rely on eyewitness reports about the conditions in the camps, the systematic disenfranchisement, the terror to break people’s will, the permanent brainwashing. Leading press organs in the West have now published the evaluation of internal police files that had gotten into the hands of human rights activists through a data leak.
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Anyone who disappears into this world of terror only comes out again as a shadow creature. And what makes you a criminal is entirely arbitrary. One ends up in the warehouse because he used his mobile phone too often on the Internet – another because he strictly avoided the online world for months. Everything can be used against you as a Uyghur, everything makes you suspicious. The only thing you can count on is the severity of the punishment: seven years for opening a prayer book, 12 years for participating in a prayer group, 16 years for bypassing an internet ban.
The expectations of Ms. Bachelet’s visit were correspondingly high. Finally someone who would bring up the situation in Xinjiang! The last visit by a senior United Nations official was 17 years ago. But what did the UN human rights commissioner do at their press conference in Beijing? She politely thanked them for the opportunity to see the “training centers,” as the authorities call the internment camps, and then spoke at length about the “appalling human rights abuses” in the United States.
A word about the Gulag in Xinjiang? I where. As a high-ranking member of the United Nations, you don’t want to upset the hosts. As was subsequently read, the Chinese could hardly believe their luck.
When most people think of the UN, they think of a peoples’ parliament, a kind of giant NGO in which the international community will negotiate diplomatic agreements on how to deal with the greatest evils of mankind. It may be that it used to be like this – perhaps in 1948, when Eleanor Roosevelt, as the first chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission, promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Today it is a show to give the world’s worst dictatorships a veneer of respectability.
All you have to do is look at the list of members of the Human Rights Council, the body that monitors compliance with the famous charter, and you know where you stand. The members of this heart chamber of the United Nations include: Venezuela, Pakistan, China, Libya, Cuba, Qatar, Sudan, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. This week, the panel just met for its 50th meeting. Iran is out now if I’m reading it correctly. But Cuba is at it again.
Good, you can say that the right people are sitting together here. In all of these countries, being a free spirit will get you in jail faster than you can utter the word “freedom.” You’re lucky if you end up in jail. If you’re unlucky, you’re dead.
Nor is it the case that the board remains inactive. While surfing the net recently, I came across complaints about human rights violations in Iceland. I had no idea how devastating the human rights situation is in this small North Atlantic country. I always thought Icelanders lived a relatively tranquil life among their volcanoes and geysers.
Venezuela was “concerned about the rise in racist discourse and the large number of acts of violence and sexual assault,” the Human Rights Council filing noted. Belarus is “concerned about systemic human rights problems”. China is “concerned about persistent discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities, increasing violence against women, human trafficking and the insecurity of children, the elderly and people with disabilities”. North Korea is “concerned about continued hate speech and hate crime”. Yes, and Russia, not to mention the Kremlin, expresses “concern about the increase in racist language”.
What exactly got Iceland into the ire of the Human Rights Council I have not been able to find out. I guess some Icelandic politician has dared to speak out against rogue states. Racism is a card that always hits. The smallest jungle despotism has now got the hang of it: simply throw a few terms into the air that would make any well-meaning Western European kneel and you’ve got carte blanche.
The big pullers in the UN are the Chinese. Using a combination of bribery, blackmail and intimidation, they have not only won over a number of Asian countries, but also much of the African continent. When it comes to showing off a western country, the block stands. See Iceland.
The world was shown how far China’s arm reaches at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when the World Health Organization, which belongs to the UN, became the henchman of the government in Beijing, which was still trying to downplay the danger of the virus. Of course, the virus variant Xi could not be called Xi either, but had to be called Omicron, although it would have been Xi’s turn after Delta.
But that could have been taken as an insult to Chinese head of state Xi Jinping, and the United Nations really doesn’t want to offend Xi Jinping. The Chinese can be terribly sensitive, they can tell you a thing or two about that at One United Nations Plaza.
Universalism is probably gone forever. In China, it is openly propagated that human rights are nothing more than the West’s attempt to prevent rising powers from rising. The idea that the West only invented human rights in order to be able to continue dominating the world also has its supporters in the West. Postcolonial Studies is the name of the fad in which students are taught that all evils have their roots in Western claims to superiority.
I know one shouldn’t think like that: but I sometimes catch myself thinking that I wish people who take something like this at face value a year or two as peace activists in Russia or China, where they can then prove in field trials that that the Western claim to superiority has no justification at all.
I was never a fan of Donald Trump. I made good fun of the man with the complexion of an overheated orange. But maybe his decision to quit organizations like the WHO or the UN Human Rights Council wasn’t so stupid after all. Even worse than a charade at one’s own expense is a charade where you hastily hold the curtain on evil pranks.
The readers love him or hate him, Jan Fleischhauer is indifferent to the least. You only have to look at the comments on his columns to get an idea of how much people are moved by what he writes. He was at SPIEGEL for 30 years, and at the beginning of August 2019 he switched to FOCUS as a columnist.
Fleischhauer himself sees his task as giving voice to a world view that he believes is underrepresented in the German media. So when in doubt, against the herd instinct, commonplaces and stereotypes. His texts are always amusing – perhaps it is this fact that provokes his opponents the most.
You can write to our author: By email to j.fleischhauer@focus-magazin.de or on Twitter @janfleischhauer.
