OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China 31 August 2022

OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China 

31 August 2022 2 

Contents Page I.

 Introduction........................................................................................................................................ 1-3

 II. Background.......................................................................................................................................

. 3-5 III. China’s legal and policy framework on countering terrorism and “extremism” .............................. 

5-6 A. Clarity and scope of concepts of “terrorism” and “extremism”................................................

6-8 B. Methodologies applied to identify suspects and “at risk” persons............................................

8-9 C. Scope and nature of responses to alleged “terrorist” or “extremist” conduct ........................... 

9-10 D. Breadth of preventive, investigative and coercive powers, and degree of oversight and redress............................................................................................................. 

10-11 IV. Imprisonment and other forms of deprivation of liberty .................................................................. 

11 A. Referrals to “Vocational Education and Training Centres” ...................................................... 

12-18 B. Detention through the criminal justice system.......................................................................... 

18-21 V. Conditions and treatment in “Vocational Education and Training Centres”..................................... 

21-25 VI. Other human rights concerns............................................................................................................. 

25 A. Religious, cultural and linguistic identity and expression ........................................................ 

25-30 B. Rights to privacy and freedom of movement ........................................................................... 

30-32 C. Reproductive rights .................................................................................................................. 

32-36 D. Employment and labour issues.................................................................................................. 

36-40 VII. Issues of family separation and reprisals .......................................................................................... 

40 A. Family separations and enforced disappearances...................................................................... 

40-42 B. Intimidations, threats and reprisals............................................................................................ 

42-43 VIII. Overall assessment and recommendations ........................................................................................ 

43-45 Appendix 1 

I. Introduction 

1. In late 2017, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) began receiving increasing allegations by various civil society groups that members of the Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority communities1 were missing or had disappeared in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter “XUAR” and “China”). 

In 2018, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances reported a “dramatic” increase in cases from XUAR “with the introduction of “re-education” camps in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region by the Government of China”.

2 Numerous research and investigative reports published since that time by a diverse range of non-governmental organizations, think-tanks and media outlets – as well as public accounts by victims – have alleged arbitrary detention on a broad scale in so-called “camps”, as well as claims of torture and other ill-treatment, including sexual violence, and forced labour, among others. 

3 2. During its review of China’s periodic report in August 2018, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed alarm over numerous reports of the detention of large numbers of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, under the pretext of countering religious extremism in XUAR. 

4 The Government stated that “vocational training centres exist for people who had committed “minor offences.”

5 In subsequent policy papers, the Government has presented such centres as part of its strategies to counter terrorism and to prevent or counter “extremism” in XUAR, while at the same time contributing to development, job creation and poverty alleviation in the region.

6 3. In light of the breadth and gravity of the allegations, and the nature of information received, OHCHR has sought access to XUAR to verify claims since 2018.

7 In parallel, and further to its global mandate under General Assembly resolution 48/141 and within existing resources, OHCHR has continued to monitor the situation and assess the allegations, including by reviewing and critically analysing publicly available official documentation, as well as research material, satellite imagery and other open-source information, examining their origin, credibility, weight and reliability in line with standard OHCHR methodology. 

Throughout OHCHR’s review, particular attention was given to official Government documentation and information, including laws, policies, statistical data, court decisions, and official statements and White Papers made public by the Government, as well as a number of other documents that are in the public domain and which OHCHR has assessed as highly 

1 In addition to Uyghurs, this refers to ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Huis. Further in this report the term “Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities” will be used as a shorthand. The Office is mindful, however, that there are non-Muslim members of these communities and that people from other groups may have also been affected by some of the policies discussed in this report. 

2 See Communications, cases examined, observations and other activities conducted by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, 115th session. Annex I, General Allegations, A/HRC/WGEID/115/1, 16 August 2018; Annual report to the Human Rights Council of the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, 30 July 2018, A/HRC/39/46, para. 88 and annex I. 

3 For a list of articles and media pieces on the situation in XUAR, see “Bibliography of Select News Reports & Academic Works”, compiled by M. Fiskesjö, available at: Bibliography - Uyghur Human Rights Project (uhrp.org); public victim accounts are available on the Xinjiang Victims Database: www.shahit.biz. 

4 Concluding Observations on the combined fourteenth to seventeenth periodic reports of China (including Hong Kong, China and Macao, China), CERD/C/CHN/CO/14-17, para, 40(a), 19 September 2018. 

5 Ibid. 

6 White Paper on “Vocational Education and Training in Xinjiang” (original document in English). The State Council, 17 August 2019. 

7 OHCHR, Opening statement and global update of human rights concerns by then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein at 38th session of the UN Human Rights Council (18 June 2018). 2 likely to be authentic based on strong indicia of official character. 

8 OHCHR has also closely studied information presented by the Government, including in the context of its reviews before the UN human rights treaty bodies and in response to UN Special Procedures communications, 

9 and examined material submitted to it by academic and other institutions inside China.

10 4. As part of an ongoing process of dialogue, on 17 March 2021, OHCHR formally submitted to the Permanent Mission of China to the United Nations in Geneva a request for specific sets of information, detailing various areas of particular interest, including official data, based on its review of the material up to that stage, but did not receive formal response. On 19 July 2021, OHCHR further proposed a meeting with relevant Government officials to discuss the applicable legal framework as it pertains to counter-terrorism and the prevention and countering of “extremism” in XUAR. 

11 5. By way of supplement to the extensive body of documentation, OHCHR also conducted, in accordance with its standard practice and methodology, 40 in-depth interviews with individuals with direct and first-hand knowledge of the situation in XUAR (24 women and 16 men; 23 Uyghur, 16 ethnic Kazakh, 1 ethnic Kyrgyz). Twenty-six of the interviewees stated they had been either detained or had worked in various facilities across XUAR since 2016. In each case, OHCHR assessed the reliability and credibility of these persons, the veracity of the information conveyed, and its coherence with information obtained from other sources. 

12 Securing interviews posed significant challenges. Most of the interviews were conducted remotely for COVID-related and/or security reasons. Further to the “do no harm” 

8 The latter pertains in particular to a range of documents that form part of the so-called “China Cables”, the “Xinjiang Papers”, the “Karakax List”, the “Urumqi Police database” and, most recently, the “Xinjiang Police Files”, which in whole or in part have been made public by various media outlets and researchers or have been made available to OHCHR. For a number of these documents, OHCHR was able to take steps to verify their authenticity, resulting in assessment that they are highly likely to be authentic and therefore could be credibly relied upon in support of other information. For others, such verification was not possible, even if OHCHR has no counter-indication that these documents would be inauthentic. OHCHR has not relied on any of these documents as a sole source to make any findings. In this assessment, reference to such documents is included where its content comports with that from other sources of information. 

9 See Government’s reply of 16 December 2019 to the Joint Other Letter by a group of Special Procedures of the Human rights Council, JOL CHN 18/2019; Comments on the effect and application of the Counter-Terrorism Law of the People’s Republic of China (Counter-Terrorism Law) promulgated on 27 December 2015 effective as of 1 January 2016 and its Regional Implementing Measures, the 2016 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Implementing Measures of the CounterTerrorism Law of the People's Republic of China, sent on 1 November 2019; Government reply of 8 December 2019 to the Joint Urgent Appeal by a group of Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council JUA CHN 21/2019, concerning the situation of Mr. Tashpolat Tiyip, 2 October 2019; Government reply of 23 November 2020 to the Joint Allegation Letter JAL CHN 14/2020, concerns about allegations of use of surveillance to monitor, track, and ultimately detain persons who belong to Muslim minorities in China, 7 July 2020; Government reply of 13 October 2021 to Joint Allegation Letter JAL CHN 18/2020, concerns about allegations of forced labour in the context of Vocational Education Training Centres, 12 March 2021 and Government reply of 23 May 2021 to the Joint Allegation Letter JAL CHN 21/2020, concerns about allegations of arbitrary detention, ill-treatment as well as of gender-based violence against Ms. Gulbakhar Jalilova, 10 February 2020. 

10 This includes a list submitted on 27 July 2021 of thirteen press conferences held by Chinese officials on the situation in XUAR, explaining different sets of measures and achievements relating to security, development, poverty alleviation, family planning, birth rates, labour and employment, as well as five documentaries providing additional perspectives. OHCHR further received numerous submissions, including from research institutes and organizations based in XUAR and attended numerous side events organised by the Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China in Geneva. 

11 A follow-up note was sent on 3 September 2021, indicating in detail areas for clarification. 

12 Over one third of the 40 interviewees had either not been interviewed by others, or had been interviewed in the past by researchers, civil society or journalists, but opted not to publicly share their experience prior to speaking to OHCHR. Where the assessment quotes directly from an account of an interviewee, OHCHR has accepted the statement as assessed and described to be truthful and relevant, unless stated otherwise. Direct references to specific statements in the report should not be taken as an indication that it was the sole basis of judgment in relation to the issues under analysis. These direct references and citations were included to provide an example or illustration. 3 principle, additional measures were taken in accordance with standard OHCHR practice to enhance protection of persons providing information. 6. The assessment contained in this document is based on China’s obligations under international human rights law, contained principally in the human rights treaties to which China is a State Party, in particular the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). China has also signed, though not yet ratified, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). As a result, it is obliged as a matter of law to refrain from any acts that would defeat the object and purpose of this treaty.

13 Additionally, China is bound by human rights norms accepted as constituting customary international law, notably with respect to the right to life, the prohibition of discrimination based on race, religion or sex, and the right to freedom of religion.

14 Moreover, some human rights norms are also considered to constitute jus cogens or peremptory norms of international law, accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted under any circumstances. These include the prohibitions of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, slavery, arbitrary detention, racial discrimination, and the commission of international crimes including crimes against humanity.

15 Finally, OHCHR considered standards contained in United Nations instruments on counter-terrorism and the prevention and countering of violent extremism, as well as the International Labour Organization’s labour rights conventions.

16 7. The assessment was shared with the Government for factual comments, as per standard OHCHR practice. The Government’s response, further to its request, is annexed to this report. 8. Separately, the Government extended an invitation to the High Commissioner to visit China in September 2018. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to discuss the parameters of such a visit, agreement for the visit was only reached in March 2022. As part of her visit, it was agreed with the Government of China that the High Commissioner would also visit XUAR, following deployment of an advance team to prepare for her visit, which took place in April and May 2022

Britain After Ukraine A New Foreign Policy for an Age of Great-Power Competition

 

Britain After Ukraine

A New Foreign Policy for an Age of Great-Power Competition

BY TOM TUGENDHAT

September 1, 2022

• TOM TUGENDHAT is a Conservative Member of the British Parliament and the Chair of its Foreign Affairs Committee.

Six months after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of a European democracy, the West is awakening to a startling reality: the nation-state is back. The institutions built to constrain rogue actors are vulnerable, and technology has given autocracies new forms of leverage. Rather than the last gasp of nationalism, the attack on Ukraine shows the new direction of power.

Risks that were only possible now look probable. The Baltic states’ paranoia about Russia now seems well founded, and Finland and Sweden’s once-vaunted neutrality no longer appropriate. Even Beijing’s threats against Taiwan look less performative and more preparatory.

The severity of the international response to Russia’s aggression is just as notable. For years, Moscow made clear its plans—cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, the occupation of Georgia in 2008, the attack on Ukraine in 2014—but Europe and the West treated these events as business as usual. This time is different. Governments from Tokyo to Stockholm are proving their resolute support for Ukraine with military aid and unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia.

The global order has been upended, and the events of the past year show that the world has moved into a new era of brutish great-power politics. Western democracies now inhabit a world in which multilateral institutions are no longer able to provide the stability or security they once promised. For a country such as the United Kingdom, whose economic and diplomatic model is based on its status as a globally connected nation, the new instability presents an acute threat. 

Until recently, the United Kingdom’s response to this discordant new world has been dangerously inadequate. Shaped by the post–Cold War decades of globalization, British foreign policy has found itself unprepared for the rise of autocracy and the combustible new conflicts that have come with it. The country’s dependence on others for energy and technology have exposed it to powerful new forms of external pressure that weaken its economic foundations.

Too often, the United Kingdom has responded by ignoring the problem or turning inward. Instead, the United Kingdom must exploit its own traditional strengths of outreach, diplomacy, and influence by seeking new kinds of partnerships with current allies and future powerhouses. And it must do so while reducing its exposure to malign powers and building its economic resilience at home. Accomplishing both will be tough, but failure to do so could risk reducing the country into a vassal of the new world order. The costs of maintaining the status quo are already apparent, not only in growing energy insecurity and severe economic pain but also in the gradual erosion of liberal values that underpin freedom.

INTO A DANGEROUS WORLD

British foreign policy did not start from here, of course. Over the past three decades, from the end of the Cold War through the first decade of this century, burgeoning connectedness and growing partnerships took root across the world. International institutions such as the World Trade Organization, by and large, worked well enough. Even after the September 11 attacks, the threat of international terrorism was asymmetric and comparatively limited, affecting only small parts of the global network at any one moment, even if specific incidents echoed more widely. Where geopolitical conflicts emerged, such as the messy breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s or even the reignited wars in Sudan and Yemen, they rarely seemed to threaten the institutions that buttress the international order.

During these years, the rise in connectivity delivered remarkable prosperity and freedom for hundreds of millions of people, not only in the West but all across the world. Technology and the Internet promised opportunity and openness as flows of trade and information delivered growth and built new connections between countries and communities.

The climax of this hopeful era arrived only a few years ago. It was marked not only by extraordinary trade between United Kingdom and China but also by Germany’s industrial strategy, built on a deliberate dependence on Russian energy through Baltic Sea pipelines. Policymakers and businesses made thousands of smaller decisions based on the assumption that geopolitical rivals were no longer threats and that economic competition was based on fixed rules.

Over the past decade, however, these assumptions have come crashing down. The forces of globalization that made the United Kingdom richer, reduced its costs, and knotted its citizens into a global network also helped authoritarian governments create monopolies and turn international hubs into choke points. China’s dominance in manufacturing, for example, leaves British citizens medically dependent on Guangzhou for items no longer made in Europe. Just-in-time commerce has become not just a supply chain principle but a way for adversaries to amass power. The quest for efficiency has led to dependency, and technology has accelerated the change.

Nor are these the only forces undermining global stability. Viewed from Beijing and Moscow, Western disasters such as the botched U.S.-led withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 have reinforced a perception of weakness. Watching Washington’s failures in Afghanistan—where its strategic impatience left allies exposed—autocrats concluded that Western democracies have lost the will to endure. Moscow’s assault on Kyiv may have failed, but China is watching and absorbing lessons on how to threaten Taiwan. The era of “respectful disagreement”—when dictatorships had more to gain from using existing systems than breaking them—is over. Where many Western leaders in the first post–Cold War generation saw globalization as bringing greater interdependence and efficiency, our rivals saw the creation of new vulnerabilities.

The world is witnessing a turning point and perhaps the end of the post–Cold War order. This transformation has led us back into great-power competition, where the biggest states build influence and assert their interests through strength, not negotiation.

These are the evolutions we have been witnessing, and the triggers for the changes I have been calling for in my five years as chair of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. From the government’s response to this new arms race, and the cancer of kleptocratic cash in London and Westminster, to the rising influence of autocracies in British universities and civil society the committee has been calling for a rethink in the government policy, not just diplomacy, starting with a reevaluation of the economic and geopolitical forces now shaping the country. For too long, Britain has treated many of these developments as isolated foreign policy issues rather than symptoms of larger problems with the whole body politic, impossible to confine to just foreign affairs. The challenge now is to find new ways to deliver for the British people by shaping actions at home and abroad amid enormous global unrest.

Over the past year, the Ukraine crisis has led to a growing recognition of this larger threat. Many now understand that the United Kingdom cannot flourish, or even stay free, if it is forced to choose between allowing the steady expansion of authoritarian power or watching its economy suffer as despots exact an ever higher price in economic and energy disruption. It’s now clear that the country will have to go much further to ensure security and economic resilience.

LESS FRAGILE, MORE NIMBLE

In this new era of great-power politics, the response must not be to turn inward. Instead, it should lean into the strengths it has honed over decades. For the United Kingdom, partnerships are power. It can address the economic dependence and lack of resilience that have become its key weaknesses by building networks, not just missiles.

Building alliances to confront the most pressing issues of our time was how the country fought and won the Cold War. It must also be how it fights and wins the wars of the future. After the Allied victory in Europe and Japan, the United Kingdom helped bring allies together to remake the world. The World Trade Organization and the Bretton Woods monetary system embedded trade and cooperation among countries that recognized the rule of law as paramount. Over the next decade new partnerships will need to be built to provide a scaffolding for an increasingly unstable world, and the United Kingdom is well placed to take a leading part in their construction.

London hosts one of the world’s most extensive diplomatic networks and wields global influence through the media and its rich legal tradition. The United Kingdom’s strengths make it well placed to build the bridges which can reverse the concentration of economic and diplomatic power by authoritarian regimes, which have increasingly sought to build dependencies from other countries to insulate themselves from the consequences of their belligerence.

But such an approach cannot simply replicate the global networking of previous decades. At the center of the new British strategy must be a simple idea: although it may benefit the country to build trade relations with many different countries across the world, these ties should not come at the expense of deeper partnerships among close allies that emphasize security and a set of shared values. Instead of reopening trade and economic dialogues with China, it should focus efforts on partnerships with countries in the Commonwealth, Europe, and others, such as Indonesia, that are on a path closer to the West’s. Building trade with trust strengthens resilience rather than weakening it.

Starting with ad hoc cooperative structures, the United Kingdom can make economic and diplomatic systems more responsive to the needs of the British public. Instead of a single new institution, the country should seek a series of overlapping partnerships covering trade, medicine, science, defense, technology, and migration in different regions of the world. Smaller and more nimble, these partnerships can build a baseline of cooperation on issues that matter most today, such as technology, climate change, and security; they can also be deepened over time. 

AUKUS, the trilateral security pact that Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States created in 2021, is a perfect example of this approach. It doesn’t replace the UN or NATO, but it provides a framework for deeper collaboration on sensitive and strategic technologies. Better still, it can be expanded. As the technological component of the accord grows, different parts of the pact could include cooperation with Japan and Germany and perhaps France. 

The new Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, is paving a similar path through trade partnerships among fast-growing Indo-Pacific nations. The United Kingdom is right to pursue membership. With the approach set by the partnership, it can work with rising economic powers, including not only Southeast Asian members of ASEAN but also Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria.

In the new era of great-power rivalry, multilateral cooperation still has a role to play. But the United Kingdom should prioritize reform in areas that truly require global consensus, such as climate change. The country can deepen its reach by leveraging its legal expertise to draft agreements that build on access to British courts and shape global norms around democracy and the rule of law. The British government will have to look at the obstacles it has built—from visas and professional qualifications to tariffs and quotas—for others who seek to use its capital and markets. Drawing on its expertise in trade, foreign aid, diplomacy, and defense, the United Kingdom can enable a more flexible and responsive strategy that combines smaller partnerships with more global action where needed.

A DICTATOR-PROOF ECONOMY

But the West faces a far-reaching economic challenge as well. As with its counterparts, as long as the United Kingdom remains dependent on Chinese technology and Russian gas, its foreign policy can be compromised by hostile actors. In basic terms, the country needs to think more about the value it gets from addressing long-term strategic vulnerabilities and less about the immediate costs. The war in Ukraine has shown what can happen when powerful states are prepared to use their economic as well as their military might, and it would be foolish for the United Kingdom not to protect itself from attacks aimed at the British economy itself. 

This cannot mean isolation: decoupling from the global economy is not an option. The United Kingdom is dependent on Taiwan for semiconductors and on Silicon Valley for data services and much else. But even with friends and allies, the British government needs to think about what hidden vulnerabilities lurk in its supply chains. Many areas of the service sector rely on an increasingly narrow core of companies—from TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor company, to Amazon—injecting further risk into the economy.

Economic resiliency does mean properly addressing the structural weaknesses that encourage dependence. With the return of great-power competition, economic warfare will become more frequent, and the United Kingdom will need to build up its defenses accordingly. The country cannot have an independent and strong foreign policy until the foundations of the state can be made less vulnerable to shocks. 

The most obvious area is energy. British thinking on energy has been built on the underlying assumption that access to global gas markets can provide the cushion it needs to make the painful reductions necessary to reach net zero carbon emissions. But Russia’s weaponization of energy pricing has exposed the weakness of this approach.

The country will need to generate more energy domestically, whether by authorizing more nuclear power plants and developing a stronger homegrown nuclear industry, accelerating the adoption of renewable energy sources by shortening the timescales needed to build or upgrade infrastructure, or boosting North Sea exploration by granting more licenses. Perhaps most immediately, the United Kingdom must work with partners such as Canada to make the case for further exploration and exports of energy resources by democratic countries to ensure that fossil fuels are obtained from allies, not from enemies. 

The same principle applies to other areas of scarcity, from semiconductors to critical minerals. Notably, China has made a concerted effort to establish monopolies in these areas. The most charitable interpretation is that Beijing wants to safeguard the needs of its domestic market; a more sobering view is that it is seeking to leverage its economic power to gain influence over rivals. Yet the United Kingdom has until recently done very little to protect its own critical industries, despite rivals’ engaging in systematic theft of British innovation and intellectual property. 

This problem demands more scrutiny of foreign takeovers. The new National Security and Investment Act grants the powers the country needs, and it must now be willing to use them and look beyond the market effect to the deeper implications of any international deal. It demands a more rigorous approach to international research collaborations and university spinouts. And it demands a better understanding of which areas of UK science and innovation are worth protecting. Announced in July, the government’s critical minerals strategy, establishing how the country will secure supply chains for those resources, is a good example of the approach needed to identify areas of strategic weakness and resolve them. Now the same is needed in areas such as semiconductors and synthetic biology.

LEADING BY SUPPORTING

Above all, the United Kingdom can increase its resiliency by leveraging its strategic partnerships with key democratic partners. Already the U.S. partnership in intelligence and nuclear technology shows how trusted allies can add strength and save cost. Looking more widely, it is possible to envision a more integrated trade network reducing dependency on unreliable sources. As history has shown, trade isn’t just about profit. Britain and the United States could provide a new axis of growth by enabling their services to connect and empower development around the world, challenging China’s debt-webs. From individual states to the federal government, that openness would strengthen the welfare of U.S. and British citizens and open markets for millions.

This goes beyond major allies. In the face of growing threats from autocratic regimes in recent years, many countries have stepped up to lead. In defense of democracy, Lithuania has been clear and strong in standing up for Taiwan. In setting new standards for digital governance, Estonia has been a global leader in areas ranging from digital public services to cybersecurity, and since 2008 it has hosted NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, which allows alliance members to share information and develop new strategies to counter cyberwarfare. For both countries, strong British support could enhance the reach of such efforts and help them deliver for their own people as well as for the United Kingdom. By backing other similar initiatives, the British government could strengthen its allies and encourage stability and democratic values.

This isn’t just about the United Kingdom, but about the fate of democracy, freedom, and global resilience. Democracies’ ability to adapt and rebuild is the main reason they are stronger than autocracies. They can pivot and rebalance, reversing the structural weakness that autocratic forces of centralization inject into our intertwined economies, making every society stronger. The core values of open societies are at stake: the right to choose and change leaders and direction, to criticize and correct, to experiment and succeed, and, yes, to fail. That’s good for every nation, however it is governed.

The fracturing of the globalized world into newly assertive nation states will create friction, but with new forms of cooperation can be turned into a strength for the world’s democracies, by driving them to build new networks with competition and values at their core, that can generate the resilience the West needs. That’s the role the United Kingdom can play, as it builds more effective alliances and partnerships, but it can only do so if it recognizes the scale of the challenge, and mobilizes the forces necessary to achieve them.

The Gorbachev Vacuum How the Soviet Leader’s Legacy Helps Explain Russia’s Wars

 

The Gorbachev Vacuum

How the Soviet Leader’s Legacy Helps Explain Russia’s Wars

BY MICHAEL KIMMAGE

August 31, 2022

• MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Visiting Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.

Russian folk culture cherishes the figure of the holy fool. Derived from Orthodox Christianity, the holy fool is out of sync with conventional society. The holy fool speaks the truth, though to others it may sound like nonsense. The holy fool stumbles through life, experiencing successes that are failures and failures that are successes. Holy fools can be prophets. Although everyone else is preoccupied with the world as it is, the holy fool can intuit the world as it might be, and perhaps the world as it will be. Wisdom can initially look like folly, and folly can appear at the outset to be wisdom.

It is possible to see Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who died on August 30, at the age of 91, as a holy fool. He was out of sync with the conventional Soviet society into which he was born, in 1931, precisely because he was so sincerely Soviet—and because he never ceased being sincerely Soviet, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He spoke an important truth about international politics, which is that it should show some concern for humanity and not just for national egotism, a truth that took on particular significance in the nuclear age. And his greatest success, the reform of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, turned out to be his greatest failure, when reform led to peaceful revolutions across the Soviet imperium. Gorbachev reformed the Soviet Union out of existence.

But in another sense, Gorbachev was the opposite of a holy fool, for he was anything but a prophet. In the early 1980s, he did intuit the world as it might be. His utopia featured a Soviet Union with a shining Leninism at its core and a Europe peacefully stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok: liberty, fraternity, and equality finally achieved. But he did not intuit the world as it would be once his reforms ran their course. He did not intuit the fall of the Soviet Union. He did not intuit the piecemeal Europe of the 1990s, half in the European Union and half out, half in NATO and half out. He did not intuit the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was no less Soviet than Gorbachev but who had no investment in Soviet idealism. Putin had an appreciation of Soviet power (and of Russian power) that Gorbachev never shared.

Ultimately, the mystery of Gorbachev rests on a distinction between Gorbachev the man and Gorbachev the statesman. They were two very different people.

DECENT MAN, INDECENT SYSTEM

In his heyday, Gorbachev could be arrogant. He is a case study of the intellectual in power, with the intellectual’s temptation to follow big ideas—all the way to the point of self-immolation. Nevertheless, Gorbachev’s decency was exceptional, and not just for the Soviet system, in which crime and state power seamlessly mingled. Because of his decency, he would accept costs that few other politicians would accept. Gorbachev’s arrogance did not stop him from sacrificing for principle.

This decency would itself come to have world-historical implications. Gorbachev was not really a man of peace. At times, including in Lithuania in January 1991, when Soviet soldiers killed 14 peaceful protesters and injured 140 more, he employed state violence to suppress political initiatives of which he did not approve. Gorbachev’s decency, then, lay not in his rejection of violence but in his rejection of mass violence and nihilistic violence. The means of mass violence were at his disposal, but for the most part, he chose not to use them against dissident or breakaway movements in the Baltic republics, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. He did not want to let those Soviet republics and satellite states go. But he did let them go—a rare gift in the annals of European history.

Another gift, less obvious and more complicated, was the way in which in Gorbachev gave up his own power. By December of 1991, he had been outdueled by the chair of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. Earlier that year, in August, Gorbachev had been weakened by an attempted coup carried out by Soviet hard-liners, who had put him under house arrest. The incompetence of the plotters doomed the plot. Just months later, Gorbachev was finally forced out, when Yeltsin and his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts started dissolving the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev did not summon the military, call for violence in the streets, or seek out loyalists within the KGB to keep him in power by force. Instead, Gorbachev decided to become the George Washington of post-Soviet Russia. He demonstrated that a peaceful transfer of power was both necessary and possible. Unlike Soviet leaders such as Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev—and unlike Putin, presumably—Gorbachev concluded that it was better not to die in office. It was better for those with power not to hold on to it at all costs.

A SOVIET-SHAPED HOLE

Gorbachev may have been a decent man. But he was a catastrophically bad statesman. Despite his self-confidence, his intellectual brilliance, and his dignified bearing, Gorbachev had no idea what he was doing. In the name of preserving a form of Leninism that had little purchase on the actual functioning of the Soviet Union, he undertook a series of actions that quickly spun out of control. After granting individuals and groups greater freedom for the sake of saving the Soviet Union, he had to watch as they employed this freedom to undermine the Soviet Union. He did not understand the motivations of the people he ruled. He did not understand their nationalism. He did not understand their cynicism. He did not understand the role that coercion played in keeping the Soviet Union afloat, and he was thus naive about what would happen when that coercion was diminished through glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), the buzzwords of his tenure.

Gorbachev cannot be blamed for Putin’s terrible wars in Ukraine. Gorbachev may have been uneven in how he spoke out against Putin, whom he did not like, but Gorbachev would not have fought these wars. Gorbachev does bear responsibility, however, for a set of circumstances that served as the precondition for Putin’s wars and for the disastrous state of Russia’s relations with the West. Gorbachev’s inept statesmanship created an immense vacuum in eastern and central Europe. He had no sustainable vision for this strategically crucial region. He was too decent to keep it under Moscow’s thumb and too Soviet to negotiate some other set of arrangements, so he simply got swept away by the ensuing confusion.

The vacuum Gorbachev left when he was compelled to retire, in 1991, has posed problems for both Russia and the West. Putin has interpreted this vacuum as Russia’s loss, and Putin speaks for many Russians in this regard. That which Russia lost, Putin has argued, it must regain—through military force, if necessary. In 2008 in Georgia and then in 2014 in Ukraine, Putin started the wars of Soviet succession—less than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s vacuum has mostly been interpreted in the West as the West’s gain, and the raft of freshly independent countries in 1991 validated that thesis. But if the West had figured out a workable security architecture for Europe in the 1990s, if it had truly figured out the Gorbachev vacuum, there would be no war in Ukraine today. NATO and the EU filled much of the vacuum. But they did not fill all of it, and in the interstices a new Cold War has taken shape.

Criticism of Gorbachev the statesman should not overshadow a qualified admiration for Gorbachev the man. He was certainly not holy, but neither was he wholly foolish. And he was no villain, despite the scorn that many Russians have come to feel for him. As Prince Hamlet said of his deceased kingly father: “He was a man, take him for all in all.”

Readout of President Joe Biden’s Call with Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel

 Readout of President Joe Biden’s Call with Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel

AUGUST 31, 2022

•

STATEMENTS AND RELEASES

President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke today with Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel to consult on global and regional security challenges, including threats posed by Iran. The President underscored U.S. commitment to never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. The President expressed appreciation for the warm reception during his July trip to Israel, a visit that illustrated the unbreakable bonds and friendship between our two countries. The President also emphasized the importance of concluding the maritime boundary negotiations between Israel and Lebanon in the coming weeks.

Tunisia is the sole survivor of the Arab Spring. It was nice while it lasted.

July 22, 2022

Tunisia is the sole survivor of the Arab Spring. It was nice while it lasted.

By Tommaso Virgili

On July 25, Tunisians return to the polls for a historical vote: a referendum on whether to repeal the democratically-drafted constitution of 2014 and replace it with a new charter immaculately conceived by President Kais Saied.

The date isn’t a coincidence. On July 25, 2021, Saied engineered what has been dubbed a “constitutional coup.” Claiming to act under Article 80 of the constitution, which allows the president to take exceptional measures in case of “imminent danger threatening the nation’s institutions or the security or independence of the country,” Saied took sweeping decisions, which effectively dismantled the rule of law in Tunisia. He suspended parliament and lifted immunity from MPs, appointed a new government, took control of the judiciary, issued unlawful travel bans, and replaced officials in national and regional governments, security agencies, and other bodies.

Although matters have become much clearer now, from the beginning, many denounced the move as being more of a coup d’état than a constitutional procedure. Among them were prominent constitutionalist Yadh Ben Achour, a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee and president of the post-2011 Higher Political Reform Commission, and Moncef Marzouki, who served as interim president during the post-revolutionary phase. Due to his appeal to France to stop supporting the illegitimate government, Marzouk has been sentenced to four years in prison in absentia.

It’s worth noting that Article 80 requires the involvement of the head of government and of the speaker of parliament, as well as parliament in “continuous session,” and a review by the constitutional court after thirty days. Clearly, none of these conditions were met since last July, and the fact that the constitutional court never came into existence certainly doesn’t mean that its role as a guarantor becomes redundant.

Saied, an Islamist?

The fact that Saied wasn’t exactly a champion of liberal democracy should have already been clear during his 2019 electoral campaign, as he adamantly opposed some of the key reforms proposed by the Individual Freedoms and Equality Committee (COLIBE)—a body created by late President Béji Caïd Essebsi to make existing legislation on individual liberties compliant with the 2014 Constitution.

Among those reforms, equality in inheritance rights between men and women was actually making concrete steps up the legislative ladder thanks to Essebsi’s support—before being hastily dismissed by Saied on grounds of not being in line with sharia law. Saied further spoke in favor of resuming the death penalty and against decriminalizing public display of affections between unmarried couples, as well as homosexuality. The president even went as far as calling LGBTQI Tunisians “deviants” acting as a Western fifth column to “corrupt the Islamic nation.”

These positions are worth remembering now that Saied is portrayed, by admirers and detractors alike, as the bête noire of Islamists, and of the Ennahdha party in particular. Ideologically, his adamant conservatism and his populist appeal to religious rhetoric situate him in the Islamist camp (if the term is understood to mean an ideology that seeks to transfer religious precepts into legal and social realms). Thus, it’s no surprise that Ennahdha actually backed him in the run-up to the 2019 presidential elections.

On this front, the more secular character of Saied’s new constitutional project, with the removal of the reference to Islam from Article 1, is only a façade, as Article 5 positions Tunisia as part of the “Islamic umma” and calls on the state to “implement the goals of Islam, namely the preservation of the human entity, honor, money, religion, and freedom.” The text, furthermore, maintains the requirement for the president to be a Muslim and introduces the problematic duty of the state to ground education on the “Arab-Islamic identity,” which has been denounced as a further departure from the secular education system established by Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba.

In other words, getting rid of Islam in Article 1 seems like yet another populist move to boost the president’s credentials in the anti-Islamist camp, with no real secularizing potential. But this is a secondary aspect when compared with the destruction of the rule of law that the charter portends.

Unchecked powers

If implemented, the new constitution would grant nearly unchecked powers to the president, who would be able to propose new legislation with precedence over the parliament’s own, approve state budgets, dissolve the parliament, and appoint a government not subjected to parliamentary confidence, which only a two-third majority of lawmakers could dissolve. All of this would happen in the absence of concrete checks and balances or impeachment mechanisms.

Moreover, elected Members of Parliament would share their power with a newly-created second chamber, known as the Council of Regions and Districts, with tasks that are unclearly defined and whose members are to be elected by regional and local councils. This departure from a classical representative democracy is not new for President Saied, who has not hesitated to define the parliament as a “danger to the state.” The attack to the rule of law is so blatant that even Sadok Belaïd, who chaired the commission for the first draft of the constitution to be delivered to the president, has disavowed the final text rewritten by Saied, affirming that it paves the way for a dictatorship.

In fact, the drafting commission itself was part of the problem, as the drafting process lacked basic requisites for democracy, transparency, and procedural guarantees. The contrast with the constituent process that led to the adoption of the 2014 constitution couldn’t be more striking. This was a lengthy and troubled endeavor, which was undertaken under public scrutiny by a constituent assembly elected through free and fair elections in 2011, and with the key involvement of civil society (led by the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, whose effort earned it the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize). Conversely, the new draft has been written hurriedly behind closed doors by a consultative body of unclear composition authoritatively appointed by the president—in clear violation of domestic and international law. Finally, public participation has been confined to a merely consultative “online survey” that saw as little as 7.5 percent of the electorate participate.

The next step is the July 25 referendum on the draft. No threshold is needed for it to pass. Furthermore, as the transitional provisions state that the constitution “shall enter into force as of the date of the final announcement of the referendum result by the Independent High Authority for Elections,” the result could be understood as merely redundant. At any rate, a fair result could hardly be guaranteed, after Saied illegitimately renewed the entire membership of the Independent High Authority for Elections to meet his tastes.

Following another key rule of the dictator’s handbook, President Saied has promised a utopia. In the new Tunisia, Saied claimed that “there will be no misery, terrorism, famine, injustice, or pain.” Unfortunately, history has shown that utopias promising heaven on earth have the tendency to turn into living hells. Will the democratic aspirations so bravely and steadfastly manifested by Tunisians win this ultimate battle?

Tommaso Virgili is a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels.

U.N. report: China may have committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang

 U.N. report: China may have committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang

By Lily Kuo and Emily Rauhala 

Updated August 31, 2022 at 7:10 p.m. EDT|

Published August 31, 2022 at 6:36 p.m. EDT

Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, at a news conference in Geneva. (Pierre Albouy/Reuters)

A U.N. report on human rights abuses in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, released late Wednesday after months of unexplained delays, concludes that China’s actions “may” constitute international crimes, particularly crimes against humanity.

Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia's war in Ukraine.

The report by U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet came in the final minutes of her last day on the job and ended speculation that it might never become public. The closely watched review had faced criticism from both human rights advocates, who worried that it would whitewash state-sponsored abuses, and Chinese officials, who insisted that the investigation was politically motivated and strongly opposed its release.

“The high commissioner’s damning findings explain why the Chinese government fought tooth and nail to prevent the publication of her Xinjiang report, which lays bare China’s sweeping rights abuses,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.

China slams U.N. ‘farce’ on Xinjiang as Uyghur exiles praise report

Richardson called on the U.N. Human Rights Council to initiate a comprehensive investigation, with the report as its guide, into the Chinese government’s actions targeting the Uyghurs and others — “and hold those responsible to account.”

The 46-page report looked at many dimensions of a years-long campaign and found evidence that “serious human rights violations” were committed under the guise of counterterrorism and counterextremism.

“The implementation of these strategies,” it concludes, “has led to interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights.”

The report found that mass detention in Xinjiang from 2017 to 2019 was “marked by patterns of torture.” There also were “serious indications of violations of reproductive rights through the coercive and discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies.” Accounts of sexual violence were “credible.”

Chinese authorities should release all individuals who have been “arbitrarily deprived of their liberty,” the report says, and help people find information about missing family members.

Bachelet visited Xinjiang, in China’s northwest, in May, attending a highly orchestrated six-day government tour that critics said did little more than provide officials with a propaganda win. At the end of the trip, Bachelet said she was unable to determine the scale of a reeducation and incarceration program directed at ethnic Uyghurs, emphasizing that the visit was “not an investigation.” Addressing activists and relatives of detained or disappeared Uyghurs that had written to her office, she said, “I have heard you.”

Beijing opposed the report’s publication, noting recently that hundreds of Chinese organizations in Xinjiang had sent letters to Bachelet’s office protesting the release of such an “unauthorized and untruthful” assessment.

U.N. human rights chief disappoints Uyghur advocates on visit to China

Despite witness accounts, public records, leaked government directives and police records, satellite imagery, and visits to the region by diplomats and journalists that have revealed the use of forced labor and the mass detentions of an estimated 1 million to 2 million residents in reeducation camps, Beijing claims its years-long campaign in Xinjiang is about fighting terrorism and alleviating poverty. It also denies or plays down evidence of children being separated from their parents, reports of repressed birthrates of Uyghur residents, and evidence that Uyghur identity and culture are being restricted.

Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, called on the Office of the High Commissioner to “stand on the right side of history … and reject publishing an assessment on Xinjiang based on false information and false accusations.”

For China, the timing of the report is particularly sensitive: It comes less than two months before a key political meeting for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to be given a precedent-breaking third term that will cement his position as the country’s strongest leader since Mao Zedong.

In recent years, China — a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council with veto power — has expanded its leverage within the United Nations, promoting an alternative version of human rights that aligns more closely with Communist Party doctrine.

In 2018, Bachelet’s office announced that it would investigate allegations of human rights violations in Xinjiang. Last September, she said she had not secured meaningful access to Xinjiang but that her office was “finalizing its assessment of the available information on allegations of serious human rights violations in that region, with a view to making it public.” She finally visited in May.

In the months since, human rights experts and advocates waited to hear more. Last week, Bachelet acknowledged that she was under “tremendous pressure to publish or not to publish” but said she would not be swayed.

“We’re trying very hard to do what I promised,” she told reporters in Geneva.

“China, with its massive surveillance and technological capability, is inherently capable of hiding the truth from the international community,” said Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur human rights advocate and lawyer, who was interviewed for the report. “That’s why I think this report is so important. It sends a message to the Chinese government that they’re not above scrutiny.”

Some have questioned the relevance of the report given existing evidence and China’s claims that reeducation centers — “vocational training centers,” it calls them — have been closed.

But rights groups say that even if the most severe parts of the campaign are over, the situation should be rigorously investigated.

“That doesn’t change the fact that the Chinese government has committed crimes against humanity for the last five years,” said Richardson of Human Rights Watch. “That does not erase what’s happened over the last five years and the urgent need for accountability.”

Added Asat, “There must be accountability to break this cycle of impunity for powerful states."

Kuo reported from Taipei, Rauhala from Brussels.

Coronavirus: What you need to know

The latest: The CDC has loosened many of its recommendations for battling the coronavirus, a strategic shift that puts more of the onus on individuals, rather than on schools, businesses and other institutions, to limit viral spread.

Variants: BA.5 is the most recent omicron subvariant, and it’s quickly become the dominant strain in the U.S. Here’s what to know about it, and why vaccines may only offer limited protection.

Vaccines: For people under 50, second booster doses are on hold while the Biden administration works to roll out shots specifically targeting the omicron subvariants this fall. Immunizations for children under 5 became available this summer. Here’s what to know about how vaccine efficacy could be affected by your prior infections and booster history.

Guidance: CDC guidelines have been confusing — if you get covid, here’s how to tell when you’re no longer contagious. We’ve also created a guide to help you decide when to keep wearing face coverings.

Where do things stand? See the latest coronavirus numbers in the U.S. and across the world. The omicron variant is behind much of the recent spread.

For the latest news, sign up for our free newsletter.

Image without a caption

By Lily Kuo

Lily Kuo is The Washington Post's China bureau chief. She previously served as the Beijing bureau chief for the Guardian. Before that she reported for Quartz in Kenya, Hong Kong and New York, and for Reuters in New York and Washington.  Twitter

Image without a caption

By Emily Rauhala

Emily Rauhala is the Brussels bureau chief for The Washington Post, covering the European Union and NATO.  Twitter