“WHO is just the tip of the iceberg, China is taking over the global narrative one international body at a time”: TFI had published an article with the aforementioned headline in March elucidating how China had made deep inroads in major UN international bodies. WHO, UNHRC, FAO, and UNESCO are some of the UN bodies that have become stooges of Chinese propaganda of late. The coronavirus pandemic has further accentuated the point that Dragon has a firm grip over such bodies and that they lack the spine to stand up against Beijing. Now according to a startling report by WION, this belief has been further cemented.
The news channel spoke to a United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) official who claimed that a list of Chinese dissidents was leaked to Beijing way back in 2013. The UNHRC which prides itself on shouldering the responsibility of protecting human rights had been giving away the private details of the activists-attendees to the Chinese authorities, thereby jeopardizing their lives.
#Gravitas | In an exclusive conversation with WION, a UNHRC official has claimed that a list of Chinese dissidents was leaked to Beijing. @EmmaReillyTweet says China was able to target the activists who were scheduled for a session of the UNHRC. @palkisu tells you more pic.twitter.com/xIAJPzXk81
— WION (@WIONews) May 27, 2020
Emma Riley, the whistle-blower who blew the lid off over the incident, had uncovered this secret malpractice at the UN human rights office. She stated that the details of the Chinese activists that were planning to attend the session were leaked, or to put it bluntly, the names were handed over to the Chinese representatives.
According to Riley, family members of these activists were arrested and tortured by Chinese agents. Some of them apparently even died in Chinese detention. These claims have been undisputed in Riley’s court cases.
Emma further explained that the protocol did not allow the office to share any details with any country but the rule was bent around for China. “The policy, the practice was very clear that if member states wanted to know about specific individuals, they have to ask in front of all member states. It wasn’t something that they could get secret advance information from the UN administration.”
While Turkey was denied when it bid for a similar information, the Communist Party was handed the data on a silver platter through an email from the UNHRC office.
When asked why China was given the preferential treatment she iterated that it was because China is a powerful country.
And Emma is indeed right as China enjoys unparalleled freedom in the UN. With the USA under President Donald Trump letting go of the wheel of major bodies, China has quietly snuck in and filled those vacuums with massive funding.
China donates massive amounts to the administrative and budgetary committee of the UN, which in turn controls the budget of the UNHRC. This vicious cycle is how China has been able to keep UNHRC under its thumb for so long.
The UN’s severe underfunding problem coupled with the US withdrawal from UNHRC has helped China to take the front seat of the UNHRC. China has gone as far as suggesting the phrase “human rights defender” to be removed from the UN lexicon.
With such Chinese infestation in the UNHRC, it becomes clearer as to why at the UNGA last year, the body did not take any action against China over the mistreatment of millions of ‘Uighur Muslims’ in China. On the contrary, the spineless organization accepted China’s version that its concentration camps were just “vocational training centers”.
The whistleblower highlighted one incident that took place seven years ago—imagine the horrors the CCP’s assassins would have undertaken since then. The number of activists that would have been killed.
If this revelation does not spurn the world community to get its act together and work together to cull the threat of Chinese influence, it would be hard to comprehend what else would suffice.
The COVID-19 situation is an ideal vantage point to corner the Chinese and make it answerable for the reparations it owes to the world as well as the unspeakable acts of monstrosity it would have committed against the activists and their families. The Chinese rot in the UN needs to be disinfected. We might get rid of Coronavirus but the Chinese rot would take some cleaning.