Following is the video and transcript of UN Watch director Hillel Neuer’s testimony before the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday, September 24, 2020, with interruptions by the delegate from China.
United Nations Watch (Hillel Neuer):
Madam President,
The United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has found credible reports of China’s mass detention of ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, with an estimated 1 million members of this Muslim minority herded into so-called re-education camps.
The committee found that China is restricting the Uighurs’ cultural and religious practices, and disproportionately targeting them with mass surveillance, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and other human rights violations and abuses.
And so we ask: first, by what logic should a representative of this country be part of the 5-member panel that just nominated this council’s next investigators on arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances, to be appointed in this session?
President: Excuse me, excuse me. I give the floor to China.
China: Madam President, this NGO speaker, what he says, has nothing to do with this item. According to the rules of procedure of the council, we request the president to stop this speaker from speaking.
President: I repeat what I said earlier, which is that we are under Item 3. Countries can be named, but only by way of example, and I would also ask all speakers to observe respectful and appropriate language for a UN debate. Having said that, I give the floor back to you.
Neuer: Madam President, in my hands is a document of this council, HRC/41/G/17 submitted under Agenda Item 3, by 50 UNHRC Ambassadors. And this document actually praises China for its treatment of the Uighurs, saying that people there enjoy “a stronger sense of happiness, fulfillment and security.”
The letter is signed by: Algeria, Bangladesh, Belarus, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cuba, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Syrian Arab Republic, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the State of Palestine.
Don’t they care about Muslims? Don’t they care about human rights? How could they do this?
🇨🇳 China just interrupted me at the United Nations & tried to stop me from speaking after I asked why a regime that herded 1 million Muslim Uighurs into camps is sitting on the 5-nation UNHRC panel that nominates the next UN experts on arbitrary detention & forced disappearances. pic.twitter.com/5XUqq7Zye1
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) September 24, 2020
