GENEVA (Reuters) – The U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk on Tuesday criticised governments, including China and Russia, for restrictions on civil society in a speech that also took some Western states to task for their records on poverty and police violence.
The highly anticipated speech was Turk’s most comprehensive address to the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council since he took office in October and was being closely watched by diplomats and rights groups to see what he would prioritise.
Turk, who is Austrian, said his main message to governments was to listen to people, victims and human rights defenders.
“Harsh restriction of the civic space is the Achilles heel – the fatal weakness – of governance,” he said, in an address that specifically mentioned incidents in China and Russia, referring to Beijing’s “arbitrary detention” of human rights defenders and lawyers and Russia’s closure of newspapers.
Turk opened the speech by referring to the “shocking magnitude” on the impact of the war in Ukraine, which would harm the rights of Ukrainians “for generations to come”.
He then censured Mali’s military for “serious violations” and stressed the need for continued independent oversight of the situation in Ethiopia, after Reuters reported Addis Ababa was seeking to end a U.N. probe into alleged Tigray war atrocities.
In rarer criticism of Western democracies, Turk raised U.S. police violence against Blacks and a possible record drop in living standards in Britain, urging London to talk with striking workers.
It remains to be seen whether Western countries will consider whether he gives sufficient attention to China’s alleged rights’ violations, including the large-scale detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, mentioned in around minute 30 of the 37-minute speech. Turk said his office had opened up channels of communication to follow up on rights issues in China.
China vigorously denies all abuses.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; editing by Matthias Williams and Alex Richardson)
