“While it did not go as far as it should have, the report still provides more than enough evidence proving the Chinese Communist Party is committed to eradicating Uyghurs and other religious minorities from Chinese society,” Leatherwood said in written comments for Baptist Press. “The SBC was absolutely right to call these atrocities a genocide, and it is past time for the global community to confront China about these gross human rights violations and demand their immediate end.”
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States welcomes a report that “deepens and reaffirms our grave concern regarding the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity that [Chinese] government authorities are perpetrating against Uyghurs” and other ethnic and religious minorities.
The United States “will continue to hold the [Chinese government] to account” and to urge it to release those confined unjustly, to report on those who have disappeared and to permit an independent investigation in Xinjiang, Blinken said in a written statement.
Adrian Zenz, an expert on China, described the OHCHR report as “very conservative” but said “its overall cautious and methodical approach makes the report very hard to refute.” Zenz is senior fellow and director in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The report fell short in some ways, Zenz and others said. Its sections on coerced labor and population control are “comparatively short and weak,” he said on Twitter. A diplomat reported the portion on forced sterilization “was watered down during the final hours,” Zenz tweeted. The report also was criticized for not describing China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide.
The Chinese government denounced the OHCHR report. “[T]he so-called ‘assessment’ distorts China’s laws and policies, wantonly smears and slanders China, and interferes in China’s internal affairs, … and also undermines the credibility of the OHCHR,” the government said as part of its 131-page response.
The Chinese government launched an effort to counter terrorism in Xinjiang in 2014, linking the threat to “religious ‘extremism’ and separatism,” according to the OHCHR report.
That counter-terrorism effort, however, “has led to interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights,” OHCHR reported. “Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.
