Human Rights

Address the critical issue of human rights along the Silk Road, focusing on the challenges faced by various communities. Explore initiatives aimed at improving living conditions, ensuring freedom of expression, and protecting cultural heritage. 

Summary

In January 2017, President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China gave a keynote speech

at the Palais des Nations of the United Nations in Geneva. Although world leaders regularly

give addresses there, few other occasions have seen the UN impose restrictions such as

those instituted on this occasion: before Xi’s arrival, UN officials closed parking lots and

meeting rooms, and sent home early many of the office’s approximately 3,000 staff. The UN

also barred nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from attending the speech.

Just a few months later, in April, security officials at the UN headquarters in New York City

ejected from the premises, Dolkun Isa, an ethnic Uyghur rights activist originally from

China. Isa, who was accredited as an NGO participant, was attending a forum on

indigenous issues when UN security confronted him and ordered him out of the building.

No explanation was provided. Human Rights Watch queries to the UN spokesperson’s

office elicited no substantive information about the incident.

The UN’s handling of these situations points to larger concerns about the treatment and

protection of human rights activists critical of China as they seek to participate in UN

human rights mechanisms—intended to protect the rights of all—and about China’s

attempts to thwart UN scrutiny of its own human rights record.

As a UN member state and party to several international human rights treaties, China

engages with the UN human rights system. It is a member of the Human Rights Council (the

“Council”), participates in reviews of its treaty compliance, allows some UN independent

human rights experts to visit China, and joins in assessments of its human rights record and

those of other countries as part of the Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process.

Even as it engages with UN human rights institutions, however, China has worked

consistently and often aggressively to silence criticism of its human rights record before

UN bodies and has taken actions aimed at weakening some of the central mechanisms

available in those institutions to advance rights. Because of China’s growing international

influence, the stakes of such interventions go beyond how China’s own human rights

record is addressed at the UN and pose a longer-term challenge to the integrity of the

system as a whole.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2017