Today is a public holiday in South Africa – Human Rights Day. There’s a certain irony in spending the day focusing on China’s President Xi Jinping’s visit to Vladimir Putin, knee-deep in a human rights disaster.
What one makes of the Ukraine crisis increasingly maps on where one lives. This is made clear by a remarkable new set of polling data recently published by the European Council on Foreign Relations ...
Category: Human Rights
Is Turkey Serious About Its Recent Criticism of China?
By Buğra Süsler Last December Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu held an end-of-year press conference to review the year’s foreign policy developments and Turkey’s relations with the world. A highlight of this conference was his exceptionally open criticism ...
African Ambassadors Tour Xinjiang to See “Happy Life of Local Residents”
China’s use of diplomatic junkets to justify its anti-Uyghur measures in Xinjiang to the Global South are ratcheting up again. Ambassadors and other senior diplomats from Senegal, Benin, Mali, Rwanda, Madagascar, Malawi, Uganda, Lesotho and Chad visited the region on Thursday.
Islamic Scholars Tour Xinjiang as Part of China’s Efforts to Refute “Western Lies”
A group of 30 scholars from 14 Islamic countries is participating in a highly choreographed tour of China's western Xinjiang region as part of Beijing's latest efforts to push back against well-documented U.S. and European accusations of human rights violations there. ...
Xi-Mohamud Handshake Proves Opposing China on Xinjiang Isn’t a Diplomatic Death Sentence for Small Countries
Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was one of at least a dozen heads of state to do a brief meet-and-greet with Xi Jinping during the China-Arab summit in Saudi Arabia on Friday. The interaction was wholly unremarkable, but the ...
Three African Countries Sign Canadian-led Joint Statement on Human Rights in Xinjiang
The bitter debate over human rights in Xinjiang flared anew this week at the United Nations when Canada's UN ambassador Bob Rae read a joint statement on behalf of 50 countries at a meeting of the General Assembly’s human rights committee. The joint ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
Xi Bets on Global South in Moscow
Somalia Voted With China’s Critics at the UN Human Rights Council to Initiate a Debate on Xinjiang. But Why?
Somalia was a standout last week when it was the only African country and the only Muslim-majority country to back a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council that called for a debate over China's human rights policies in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang Human Rights Council Vote Prompts Spirited Debate in Asia Over Why Governments Backed China
The two Asian governments with the world's largest Muslim populations, Indonesia and India, have been on the defensive in recent days for their vote last Thursday at the United Nations Human Rights Council to block a discussion over Chinese human rights policies in Xinjiang. ...
68 Global South Countries Give China Human Rights Cover at the UN
In what’s becoming a standard tactic, China used its support across the Global South to counter a proposal from a U.S.-led group of rich democracies for a special debate in the UN Human Rights Council on China’s anti-Uyghur measures in Xinjiang. The measure followed
More Developing Countries Choose to Stay Out of China’s Latest Spat With UN Over Human Rights in Xinjiang
China's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Chen Xu, read out a forceful rebuttal on Tuesday to the United Nations Human Rights Council's latest report that documented human rights violations in Xinjiang. There was nothing new in Chen's statement as ...
China Tries to Rally Support For Its Policies in Xinjiang in Indonesia, the World’s Largest Muslim Country
China's ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Deng Xijun, published a scathing op-ed in The Jakarta Post on Tuesday aimed at debunking the recently published report on Xinjiang by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). ...