United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet has published her long-awaited report on human rights abuses in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.
It concluded that China may have engaged in crimes that include crimes against humanity. The Beijing government was infuriated by the report, calling it politically motivated and worked to head off its publication. It failed. Now the world must follow up: Demanding not only answers to the questions that the report has raised but imposing sanctions, such as banning the use of goods made with forced labor from Xinjiang.
In 2018, Bachelet, a political detainee and the daughter of political detainees who became the president of Chile, began her term as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights by noting deeply disturbing allegations of large-scale arbitrary detentions of Uyghurs and other Muslim communities in China and called on the Beijing government to allow her office access to the region to investigate the charges.