As the 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council is scheduled to be held in Geneva on Monday, the Global Times learned that Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and some other Western countries have worked to misuse the UN platform to bring topics on China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and hyped untenable "genocide" allegations against China.
However, Chinese experts said that whatever inflammatory allegations these countries have been making, their political farce has got no legal basis from the international laws nor will they get support from the international community.
Canada will take the lead in making a Xinjiang-related joint statement at the interactive dialogue on the annual report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the Human Rights Council on June 21, according to the website of China's Permanent Mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva and other International Organizations in Switzerland.
The attempt of Canada to lead an anti-China joint statement at the 47th session of the Human Rights Council is doomed to fail, Chinese Mission spokesperson Liu Yuyin said in response to a media question on this issue.
"It seems they are bent on going down the wrong path and about to stage another political farce," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Friday, adding that China's achievements in the human rights cause, including that in Xinjiang, are universally recognized, and no one can gainsay this fact. "Standing in stark contrast are these mud-slinging countries' own deplorable human rights records," he noted.
Observers and experts reached by the Global Time said that some Western countries think they have the moral high ground to accuse China of committing "genocide," but the fact is they don't. Unlike them, China has never had a history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, nor will it take in the future.
The US, Canada, and the UK, and some of the Western countries wishing to accuse China of committing "genocide," a "projection" of facts based on their own heinous past and continued systemic violence and oppression, assumed China would do the same, Zhu Ying, deputy director of the National Human Rights Education and Training Base of the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times on Sunday.
As Chinese netizens commented, the very reason why they use these excuses to smear China is because they themselves have actually committed such atrocities. For every label of human rights violation they put on China, they can find a prototype in themselves. Here, the Global Times investigates and reveals the true face of Canada, the UK, and the US, the three countries that have abysmal human rights records.
US: American dream of genocide
While proclaiming itself a "beacon of democracy," the US in fact tramples on the human rights of peoples of color in the country, committing genocide against American Indians, systematically discriminating against Asian and African Americans, and doing nothing for social inequality.
In America's bloody history, the rights of American Indians have been seriously violated. The US government has carried out systematic ethnic cleansing and genocide against American Indian populations, among other acts of unspeakable genocidal crimes against other minorities in the country. Today, American Indians still live like second-class citizens with their rights trampled upon.
On August 5, 2020, a report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the implications to human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes, submitted pursuant to the Human Rights Council resolution 36/15, decried the situation of the indigenous peoples in the US. They are regularly exposed to toxic pollutants, including nuclear waste, released or produced by extractive industries, agriculture, and manufacturing. Soil and lead dust pollution from mining waste poses a more significant health threat for indigenous populations in the US far more than other groups.
In addition to the serious abuse of the rights of American Indians, the instances of Asian Americans being discriminated against and abused in public spaces have increased sharply since the outbreak of the epidemic. Several media outlets in the US including the New York Times reported on the dire situation that Asian Americans face in the US.
According to an NBC News report, one in four Asian American youths experience racially motivated bullying. Due to irresponsible remarks by some US politicians, hatred toward Asian Americans and specifically toward Chinese Americans was stoked to astronomical levels in the US. UN human rights independent expert Tendayi Achiume said media and political leaders who have inflamed the rise of xenophobia and racial hatred amid the COVID-19 pandemic are "entrepreneurs of intolerance," According to a UN tweet.
An FBI report released in 2020 showed that 57.6 percent of the 8,302 single-bias hate crime offenses reported by law enforcement agencies in 2019 were motivated by race, ethnicity, or ancestry. Of these offenses, 48.4 percent were motivated by anti-black or anti-African American bias; 15.8 percent stemmed from anti-white bias; 14.1 percent were classified as anti-Hispanic or anti-Latino bias, and 4.3 percent resulted from anti-Asian bias. Among the 4,930 victims of racial hate crimes, as many as 2,391 were of African descent.
This is not only peculiar to Asian Americans, but African American human rights are also seriously disregarded in the US.
On May 25, 2020, 46-year-old George Floyd was brutally killed by white police officer Derek Chauvin on the street as Chouvin knelt on Floyd's neck for nine and a half minutes, disregarding Floyd's distressed pleas at not being able to breathe. Shortly after Floyd's death, which ignited nationwide anger in the US, 29-year-old black man Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer in the presence of Blake's three children, and he was left paralyzed after the incident.
The US police shot and killed a total of 1,127 people in 2020, with no killing reported in just 18 days, according to Mapping Police Violence, a collection of interactive tools, maps, and figures that illustrate police violence in the United States. African Americans make up 13 percent of the US population but account for 28 percent of people killed by police. African Americans are approximately three times more likely than white people to be killed by police. From 2013 to 2020, about 98 percent of police officers involved in shooting cases were not charged with a crime, and the number of convicted was even lower, US media VOX reported.
Meanwhile, it's reported that people of color died from the COVID-19 epidemic in far greater numbers than their white counterparts. Of the 10 counties in the US with the highest COVID-19 mortality rates, seven had a majority of people of color.
Due to the loss of confidence in the US government amid its poor handling of the epidemic, the number of people procuring guns has raised sharply, which threatens public security.
People of color were also more harmed by the COVID-19 epidemic. Infection and death rates attributed to COVID-19 in the US showed significant racial differences, with the infection, hospitalization, and death rate among African Americans being three times, five times, and twice that of their white counterparts respectively, according to a report delivered on August 21, 2020 by the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent to the UN Human Rights Council.
Racial disparities in the epidemic equally extend to children, according to a report released on August 7, 2020 by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Latino and black children were hospitalized with COVID-19 at a rate nine and six times that of white children, respectively.
Barbara Ferrer, director of public health for Los Angeles County, said the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus disease on black and Latino residents is rooted in the impact of racism and discrimination on access to the resources and opportunities that are needed for good health, according to the Los Angeles Times website on July 10, 2020.
A tally by Johns Hopkins University showed that as of June 20, 2021, the US had registered more than 33.53 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, with related deaths exceeding 601,000.
UK: Murderous colonial cradle
While the UK prides itself as the world "leader" in human rights protection, the opposite is true, especially since the outbreak of COVID-19. Poverty in the country has increased, along with the blatant disregard for people's right to life and access to healthcare with ethnic minorities among the worst affected, analysts pointed out.
From 2018 to 2019, 14.4 million people in the UK were living below the poverty line, 4.5 million among them being children, an increase of 100,000 from the previous year; 7 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty and 11 percent of the population lives in persistent poverty, the Guardian reported.
The country's poor handling of the epidemic is deplorable, with the country once having proposed "herd immunity" as a strategy to contain the virus, leaving vulnerable groups exposed to infection.
According to a report by the Public Health Agency of England (PHE), the COVID-19 death rate among British-Bengalis is twice that of whites, and the death rate among those of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Caribbean descent is 10 percent to 50 percent higher than that of whites.
A report done by UK-based, black people-led researching organization Clear View Research showed that the majority of black people in the UK don't think their rights are equally protected as those of the white people.
According to Sky News, hate crimes against Chinese people in the UK soared during the epidemic outbreak. At least 267 offenses were reported in the first three months of 2020 including harassment, robberies, assaults, and criminal damage.
Islamophobia is also on the rise in the UK. In a detailed study released in 2019 by the Center for Media Monitoring of the Muslim Council of Britain, among over 10,000 articles and clips referring to Muslims and Islam in the period of fourth quarter of 2018, 59 percent of all articles associated Muslims with negative behavior. About 37 percent of articles in right-leaning and religious publications were categorized with the most negative rating of "very biased," and over one-third of all articles misrepresented or made generalizations about Muslims.
At the same time, according to Modern slavery in the UK: March 2020 released on March 2020 by Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK, "there were 5,144 modern slavery offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2019, an increase of 51 percent from the previous year." The number of potential victims increased by 36 percent to 10,627 in the year ending December 2018 compared with the previous year.
The ONS analyzed that the actual number of victims of modern slavery in Britain may be as high as 136,000. The top three nationalities of victims were British, Albanian and Vietnamese.
A large amount of evidence shows that in 2003, the British army captured and tortured thousands of Iraqi civilians in Iraq's southern city of Basrah, and many innocent civilians died. During its stay in Afghanistan, the UK Special Air Service (SAS) repeatedly attacked villages and massacred villagers under the cover of darkness in the name of anti-terrorism and made it a "anti-terrorism success."
There were more than 3,400 charges of war crimes, 90 percent of which were not investigated. In three months in 2011 alone, 33 civilians were suspected of being killed in 11 separate night attacks, the Times reported.
Michelle Bachelet Jeria, the High Commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights, expressed concerns on April 12, 2021, over the UK putting forward a new Overseas Operations Bill.
According to the new UK bill, if torture or other serious human rights violations committed by British soldiers overseas exceed a limit of five years, they will not be prosecuted in principle. If a prosecution must be put forward, the prosecutor must get the consent of the British Attorney General or the Attorney General of Northern Ireland.
Canada: Aboriginal slaughter grounds
For a long time, Canada has claimed to be a "model student of human rights" and has been obsessed with lecturing and remarking on other countries' human rights conditions. Ironically, Canada itself is far from a model example of upholding human rights.
Canada has grossly violated the human rights of its indigenous peoples, the latest such case to be discovered being in May.
The remains of 215 indigenous children were discovered in a former residential school, the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, which is believed to have housed 500 indigenous Canadian children. The youngest of the deceased was only 3 years old, and no information on the deaths of these children was recorded, according to Reuters.
Observers noted that this incident is another reminder of Canada's historical crimes of the brutalization of indigenous people and the extermination of indigenous culture. Statistics revealed that an estimated 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families and put in the care of "residential schools" in what a historic 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as a "cultural genocide" targeting Canada's indigenous people, where at least 4,000 children died unnatural deaths, NPR reported.
Canada has also used a reservation system to violate the rights of aboriginal people. The Canadian government set up the reservation policy in the 1880s to force Aboriginal groups to move from resources-rich areas to remote and economically disparate areas through fraud and coercion.
According to data issued by Statistics Canada, currently more than 600 Aboriginal groups living on more than 3,000 small, scattered reserves, where the live conditions are harsh and nearly isolated, and where drug addiction, alcoholism, murder, and violence are rife.
With no future or hope in sight, the suicide rate among Aboriginal people living on reserves is eight times higher than the national average for Canada.
It is alarming that crimes against the rights of Aboriginal groups continue to this day in Canada. In 2018, the UN Committee against Torture adopted its concluding observations on Canada's seventh periodic report, expressing concern about the widespread forced or coerced sterilization of Canadian Aboriginal women and girls. A 2019 report released by Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls also found that between 1980 and 2015, thousands of indigenous women and girls went missing or were murdered, 12 times more than any other group in Canada and 16 times more than white women.
At the same time, people of Asian and African descent are also subject to severe racial discrimination and unwarranted violations of immigrant rights in Canada. According to a 2020 survey conducted by Statistics Canada, 55 percent of minorities in Vancouver, 36 percent in Montreal, and 31 percent in Toronto believed that incidents of discrimination and harassment on the basis of race are on the rise.
Observers pointed out that although racism is considered a "red line" by all levels of the Canadian government, it is largely a case of "more talk, less action" and a lack of substantive initiatives to protect the legal rights of minorities.
