India absatins from voting on Uighur Muslim issue in China

On Thursday, India chose to abstain in the UN Human Rights Council’s vote on a draft resolution calling for a discussion of the human rights situation in China’s unrest-plagued Xinjiang region.

For years, human rights organisations have raised concerns about the situation in the resource-rich region of northwest China, claiming that over a million Uyghurs have been arbitrarily jailed in a vast network of facilities Beijing refers to as “re-education camps.”

The 47-member Council voted in the draft resolution on “holding a debate on the situation of human rights in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China” with 17 votes for, 19 votes against, including China, and 11 abstentions from countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Ukraine.

A core group of nations, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, introduced the draught resolution. Several other nations, including Turkey, supported it.

Several nations from the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), voted in favour of China, which has been something very unusual for the Islamic group, as the OIC has been in forefront of condemning atrocities against Muslims worldwide, be it the alleged illegal occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, Rohingya genocide in Myanmar or instances of hate speech against Indian Muslims.

Human Rights Watch’s China director, Sophie Richardson, said in a statement that the UN’s leading human rights committee, for the first time in its history, reviewed a proposal to discuss the human rights situation in China’s Xinjiang region.

“While the Council’s failure to adopt the proposal is an abdication of responsibility and a betrayal of Uyghur victims, the extremely close vote highlights the growing number of states willing to take a stand on principle and shine a spotlight on China’s sweeping rights violations,” Richardson said.

Richardson noted that “nothing will erase the stain of China’s crimes against humanity, laid bare” by a recent report of former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet

“We urge incoming High Commissioner Volker Turk to brief the Council on his office’s report, and we call on states, companies, and the international community to implement the report’s recommendations and hold Chinese authorities accountable for their international crimes,” Richardson added.

Since late 2017, the UN Human Rights Office and UN human rights institutions have received serious claims of human rights breaches against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim populations in China.