Geneva:
The UN human rights chief said on Thursday it remains unclear whether a long-delayed report on China’s Xinjiang region will be published before she resigns next week.
“My full intention was for it to be released before the end of my mandate, and we … have received substantial input from the government that we must carefully review,” Michelle Bachelet told reporters.
Bachelet said nearly a year ago that her office was finalizing a report on the rights situation in the Xinjiang region, where Beijing is accused of detaining more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
But the report has been repeatedly delayed, much to the growing outrage of rights groups.
Bachelet had vowed that the report will be released before she resigns, but with only a few days left until the end of her term, that now seems uncertain.
“We are doing our very best to deliver on what I have promised,” she told Thrusday, acknowledging that she is under “enormous pressure to publish or not to publish.”
“But I will not publish or refuse publication because of such pressure,” she insisted.
Beijing has also been accused of forcibly sterilizing women and forcing minorities to do forced labour.
The United States and lawmakers in other Western countries have even gone so far as to accuse China of committing “genocide” against minority groups, accusations Beijing vehemently denies.
China has long claimed it runs vocational training centers in Xinjiang aimed at countering extremism.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)