Volker Turk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has won re-election to hold that post for another four years. Several governments objected to the process; 144 others, including China, voted in support of a second term for him.
Over the past four years Chinese authorities have deepened repression. The Chinese government inflicts collective punishment on the families of defenders and prisoners of conscience and has a disturbing track record of defenders dying in detention. Its enthusiasm for transnational repression – an effort to silence critics of the Chinese government outside the country – is growing, and it increasingly thwarts human rights scrutiny by U.N. bodies. In fact, the Chinese government ranks high among the states targeting human rights defenders for engaging with U.N. human rights mechanisms.
While Turk has offered up occasional critiques of Beijing’s human rights abuses, ranging from calling for abusive laws to be repealed and condemning the treatment of individual prisoners of conscience, his efforts have caused Beijing no real discomfort, and not kept pace with that regime’s violations.
Just weeks before Turk formally took up the role of High Commissioner in October 2022, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a landmark report alleging that Chinese government policies toward Uyghurs and other Turkic communities entailed mass arbitrary detention, torture, and family separations. The report concluded that the Chinese government’s actions “may… constitute crimes against humanity.”
