A group of Democratic lawmakers has urged the U.N.’s Committee Against Torture to review China’s human-rights record in light of the ongoing atrocities against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
That body is tasked with monitoring torture allegations around the world. Beijing succeeded in securing the election of Huawen Liu, an academic with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, to the committee last year, as National Review reported at the time.
Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Jim McGovern, the co-chairmen of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, a body established by Congress to monitor China’s human-rights record, wrote to the Torture Committee’s chairman, Claude Heller, late last month. The committee’s work had slowed significantly while the most stringent Covid restrictions were in effect, and the two lawmakers wrote to Heller in order to influence the committee’s expected return to a normal pace of work.
They noted that the Chinese government has recently escaped the committee’s scrutiny, since the most recent iteration of a review process took place in 2015. The lawmakers cited an “overdue country report” on China’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture, which Beijing was supposed to submit in December 2019.
“We likewise note that the PRC has not responded to the August 2018 follow-up inquiry made by the Committee Against Torture . . . which raised concerns over continued reports of abuse and harassment of lawyers, the lack of an independent torture investigation mechanism, and the lack of articulated plans for implementing ‘some or all of the remaining recommendations’ included in the 2015 Concluding Observations,” the lawmakers wrote.
They also cited a number of recent cases that they said feature credible claims of torture across China, including in Tibet, Xinjiang, Guangdong, and Fujian.
“The human rights situation in China has demonstrably worsened since the Committee’s last review in 2015, particularly in the XUAR, which prompted the United States government and policymakers of multiple countries to determine that Chinese authorities have committed genocide or crimes against humanity against Turkic Muslim and other minorities in the region,” wrote the lawmakers, referring to the Xinjiang region by an acronym.
In its 2021 human-rights report on China, the State Department cited “credible reports” that found that the Chinese “authorities routinely ignored prohibitions against torture, especially in politically sensitive cases.”
More evidence of Chinese torture practices is expected to come to light in the wake of the arrival of a Kyrgyz Christian survivor of the Xinjiang camp system to the U.S. last month. That former detainee, Ovalbek Turdakun, is expected to provide testimony to Congress and the International Criminal Court on torture and other practices in the Xinjiang camps in the coming months.
Liu’s election to the Torture Committee last October might prove to be an obstacle to any independent U.N. effort to scrutinize China’s record on torture.
Before his election to the Geneva-based body, he was affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences — a research center with ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee. Liu has also taken the party’s line on the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong and defended China’s human-rights record from U.S. government reports on Beijing’s atrocities.
The Biden administration celebrated the election of a U.S. expert, Todd Buchwald, an Obama-era State Department official, to the committee that month. “I am confident he will continue to bring the important perspective of American jurisprudence towards the goal of preventing torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment internationally,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement congratulating Buchwald.
Liu’s presence on the body, and this new congressional pressure for an investigation into Chinese torture tactics, tees up a potentially significant clash at this obscure U.N. panel.