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Human Rights Watch’s Africa Advocacy Director Can’t Understand Why African Leaders Are “Shielding China Over Xinjiang”

by Eric Olander
Photo from a recent conference in Beijing where ambassadors from Burkina Faso, the Republic of Congo, and Sudan all enthusiastically endorsed China's policies in Xinjiang. Image via @WuPeng_MFAChina.

Human Rights Watch Africa Advocacy Director Carine Kaneza Nantulya is puzzled as to why African governments are not doing anything to confront China on the mass internment of Uyghur minorities in Xinjiang. She noted in a post on Monday that it’s especially ironic that African governments are seemingly giving China a pass on this issue when “Africans have endured more than their fair share of atrocities where the perpetrators got off scot-free.”

She suspects that economic factors may be at the root of the problem but, in her view, that’s not a good reason to abandon “the principles, norms and values of freedom and equality laid out in the African Union Charter”:

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