'Thug and accomplice of US': China lambasts UN body over rights abuse report

Beijing, Sep 01: China on Thursday vehemently rejected a UN Human Rights body report which alleged serious abuses Uyghurs Muslims in Xinjiang. Responding to the report beijing said that the United Nations rights office was the "thug and accomplice" of the US.

"The so-called critical report you mentioned is planned and manufactured firsthand by the US and some Western forces, it is wholly illegal and invalid," foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular briefing.

"The report is a hodgepodge of misinformation, and it is a political tool used as part of the West's strategy of using Xinjiang to control China," he added.

Wang said the UN rights office had "sunk to (becoming) the thug and accomplice of the US and the West against the vast majority of developing countries".

The statement comes after the United Nations human rights chief released a long-awaited report on crimes against humanity in China's Xinjiang region.

The report called for an urgent international response over allegations of torture and other rights violations in Beijing's campaign to root out terrorism.

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet brushed aside China's calls for the office to withhold the report, which follows her own trip to Xinjiang in May and which Beijing's contends is part of a Western campaign to smear China's reputation. The report has fanned a tug-of-war for diplomatic influence with the West over the rights of the region's native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups.

The report, which Western diplomats and UN officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes to go in Bachelet's four-year term. It was unexpected to break significant new ground beyond sweeping findings from independent advocacy groups and journalists who have documented concerns about human rights in Xinjiang for years. But Bachelet's report comes with the imprimatur of the United Nations, and the member states that make it up.

The run-up to its release fuelled a debate over China's influence at the world body and epitomized the on-and-off diplomatic chill between Beijing and the West over human rights, among other sore spots.

Hours before the release, China's UN ambassador, Zhang Jun, said Beijing remained "firmly opposed" to the release.

In the past five years, the Chinese government's mass detention campaign in Xinjiang swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps, which Beijing called "training centres" but former detainees described as brutal detention centres. Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands continue to languish in prison on vague, secret charges.

Some countries, including the United States, have accused Beijing of committing genocide in Xinjiang.