#China, #CCP, #ChineseCommunistParty, #HumanRights
Washington/IBNS-CMEDIA: Congressional-Executive Commission on China chair Rep. Chris Smith said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “getting away with murder” as it expands its tentacles in international bodies such as the United Nations (UN) to shun criticism.
Citing the CCP regime’s repression of religious freedom and pervasive use of torture, the US Panel Chair told The Epoch Times, “They [CCP] are getting away with, literally, murder in plain sight, and too many countries are acquiescing or running, sadly, away from the issues that China is notoriously known for.”
“Everywhere you look, it is bad and getting worse, and they are doing a full-court press at the United Nations to cover it up,” he added.
According to reports, US Congressional-Executive Commission on China Chair Chris Smith on April 10 presided over a hearing examining China’s decade-long effort to subvert the UN system.
The US has been the largest funder to the United Nations as it contributed as much as $18 billion in 2022—the latest year with full data available.
However, despite its outsized payments, the United States’ generosity hasn’t translated to commensurate influence at the United Nations when compared with China.
As of 2020, Chinese officials reportedly headed four of 15 United Nations specialized agencies, with deputies in nine others as leadership roles at the UN prove a handy tool for China when its interests are on the line, according to The Epoch Times.
Some past incidents show how Beijing influences or attempts to influence international bodies, including the United Nations.
In 2017, Wu Hongbo, the then under-secretary-general for the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, ordered security personnel at the UN headquarters in New York to expel a prominent Uyghur activist from the building.
In late 2016, a Chinese official leading the UN’s civil aviation body — International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) — reportedly covered up a cyber attack linked to Chinese state hackers.
Chinese delegates reportedly harassed Chinese activists, photographing and filming them on UN premises, and sought to block human rights groups critical of Beijing from gaining UN consultative status.
A Chinese representative, in 2019, twice interrupted the testimony of Hong Kong pro-democracy singer Denise Ho, who had appealed to the UN to help protect Hong Kong’s freedoms from China’s encroachment.
According to The Epoch Times report, US panel Chair Chris Smith said he was particularly frustrated to see the CCP regime sitting on the UN’s Human Rights Council that selects human rights monitors, even while China consistently blocks international requests to independently investigate human rights violations on the ground.
Smith claimed that after his anti-forced organ harvesting bill—targeting the regime’s killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs—passed the House near-unanimously, a Chinese Embassy official sent an angry email denying that the abuses had taken place, according to reports.
File image from Wallpaper Cave
Earlier in 2021, a dozen human rights experts, including special rapporteurs to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and members of a working group on arbitrary detention, said they were “extremely alarmed by reports of alleged ‘organ harvesting’ targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians, in detention in China.”
China’s browbeating has apparently worked, as UN officials have now been seen doing its bidding, reports The Epoch Times.
Leaked documents and a whistleblower claimed that high-ranking officials of the United Nations have handed dissident names to Chinese delegates upon request.
There are many more examples. Taiwan is denied a voice on the UN platform.
According to The Epoch Times, former UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, amid Chinese pressure, delayed a long-awaited report on Xinjiang until minutes before her term expired.
In a much-criticized China trip months before Bachelet left the post, she trumpeted the CCP regime’s claims of eradicating poverty.
Kelley Currie, who had served in various agencies on human rights, humanitarian aid, and women’s issues at the UN, said that Chinese officials also for years tried to slip party rhetoric such as “Xi Jinping thought” and win-win cooperation in the field of human rights into UN resolutions, and they reportedly succeeded because of “apathy and ignorance of democratic countries,” reports The Epoch Times.
