The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the past week has seen the cementing of President Xi Jinping’s position as general secretary of the CCP and as President of the Peoples Republic of China. It places Xi on a par with Mao Zedong and demonstrates the characteristics of other megalomaniacs like Stalin.

It is bad news for the people of Taiwan, who like Ukraine before them is enduring the risk of invasion by a dictator. It is also bad news for the West. Twenty years ago under the legacy created and left by the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping, it looked like broadening of trade ties and deepening of economic cooperation with, amongst other nations, Australia, would have a lasting positive impact on the future international role of China in world affairs.

The legacy of Xi will be very different. He has demolished the rule of law in Hong Kong, crushing a century of stability and history in but a few years, brutally sidelined fellow aspirants to power and critics of his regime under the guise of corruption busting, repressed ethnic and religious minorities and rattled the sabre on Taiwan in such a way as to make one think we may be at war with China in the coming years.

It is at moments like this that we look to the United Nations in forlorn hope that unlike it’s predecessor the League of Nations, it may have some influence and power to pull dictators like Xi and his junior comrade President Putin back from the brink.

However the impotence of the UN was never more unambiguously evident when on the 6th of October the UN Human Rights Council voted on whether to debate its own detailed report into the treatment of the Uyghur people in China. Shamefully, the vote was lost 17-19 with significant abstentions. At to those countries who voted against the debate, our Muslim neighbour Indonesia was amongst them as well as many other Muslim nations in the region of Xiajiang -where the Uyghers are concentrated – and Muslim nations like Qatar, host of the upcoming World Cup. Brazil and India incredibly abstained.

One can only suppose that the power and influence of China has caused these nations to sell their souls. However, the fact that the UN won’t debate its own report does not prevent us discussing its finding in the week that President Xi celebrates the outcome of the 20th Congress. It serves as an insight into the extent to which Xi and the nation of China is prepared to disregard international norms as the UN describes in detail the human rights abuses it has meted out to the Uyghers.

Situated in Central Asia and near fellow Muslim nations Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan – all of whom (bar Kyrgyzstan who does not hold a vote) voted against the resolution to debate China’s human rights abuses -the oppression of the Uyghur  people started in earnest in 2016. China asserts the treatment of the Uyghurs has been in response to terrorism. That response has included an attempt to re-educate and integrate the Uyghurs into a mainstream (read Chinese Han) way of life.

The reality has been a deal more brutal than the official lines used to justify what has been done. It has all the hallmarks of racial and religious persecution with a suspicion of far worse.

The UN Report was prepared by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and is entitled ‘Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjian Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)’. It was published in late August this year by the then High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet.

Its  findings make for grim reading, starting with describing the ins and outs of the Chinese ‘Strike Hard’ campaign allegedly aimed at terrorism. As the OHCHR found however the definition of terrorism was and is so nebulous as to likely include practicing Islam. The report says, ‘…the Chinese “anti-terrorism law system” is based on vague and broad concepts that grant significant discretion to diverse officials as to their interpretation and application. Furthermore, the legal consequences attached to such conduct are unpredictable and insufficiently regulated. Authorities are granted broad investigative, preventive and coercive powers with limited safeguards and independent judicial oversight.’

In Australia and other democratic countries, such laws would be struck down by the courts in a heartbeat as unconstitutional. They also constitute a breach of human rights. As the OHCHR report says, ‘ International human rights law requires deprivations of liberty not to be arbitrary. The prohibition of arbitrary detention, enshrined in articles 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is both a norm of customary international law and peremptory norm of international law.

Using these outrageously flimsy laws, Uyghurs can be sent to re-education camps called  “Vocational Education and Training Centres”. That is done in one of three ways; by the courts, extra-judicially by the police, and if an offender recants their supposed wrongdoing, they may enter a VETC voluntarily. In the latter case the CCP provides that a person may avoid sentence if their “subjective malice is not deep and they can sincerely repent and voluntarily accept education and assistance”. Words that would make even Orwell proud, albeit that his dystopian vision was fiction.

These camps in reality are prison camps. A person can be kept often secretly for indeterminate periods of time, some vanishing altogether. Up to one million people have been taken, although lacking all the evidence the OHCHR cannot be sure of the number. What it does have is Google Earth photographs showing an explosion in the size of these facilities, as well as statistics pointing to a massive increase in the number and length of criminal sentences being handed down by the courts in the region, and Google Earth photos showing the razing of mosques and places of religious worship. The evidence so expertly gathered by the police leads to a 99.9% conviction rate in Chinese criminal courts, according to the report. What hope do you have?

It gets worse. Once incarcerated in the so called Vocational Education and Training Centres, inmates are subject to torture, rape and sexual assault, and forced invasive gynaecological examination. The report describes inmates ‘beaten with batons, including electric batons while strapped in a so-called “tiger chair”; being subjected to interrogation with water being poured in their faces; prolonged solitary confinement; and being forced to sit motionless on small stools for prolonged periods of time.’ Further, ‘some also spoke of various forms of sexual violence, including some instances of rape, affecting mainly women. These accounts included having been forced by guards to perform oral sex in the context of an interrogation and various forms of sexual humiliation, including forced nudity. The accounts similarly described the way in which rapes took place outside the dormitories, in separate rooms without cameras.’

The report found credible evidence of forced family separation and disappearance, forced labour, denial of freedom of movement, forced return of Uygers from abroad, which is ‘in breach of the prohibition under international law of refoulement’, and under the banner of the “Becoming Family’ movement, the forcing of Uyghurs to live, in their own homes ,with cadres of men from the CCP, which the report says has led to sexual harassment.

One of the most serious allegations is of forced sterilisation. ‘OHCHR interviewed some women who said they were forced to have abortions or forced to have IUDs inserted, after having reached the permitted number of children under the family planning policy. These first-hand accounts, although limited in number, are considered credible’, says the report.

The bottom line is that the Bachelet report found the existence of serious human rights breaches committed against the Uyghurs in China. They include religious discrimination and persecution, gender discrimination, rape and sexual assault, forced sterilisation, torture, denial of freedom of movement, forced labour, and forced family separation, to name some of the rights breached under the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

In summary, the report finds:

‘Serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR in the context of the Government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-“extremism” strategies. The implementation of these strategies, and associated policies in XUAR has led to interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights. These patterns of restrictions are characterised by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.

“Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.

These have included undue restrictions on religious identity and expression, as well as the rights to privacy and movement. There are serious indications of violations of reproductive rights through the coercive and discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies. Similarly, there are indications that labour and employment schemes for purported purposes of poverty alleviation and prevention of “extremism”, including those linked to the VETC system, may involve elements of coercion and discrimination on religious and ethnic grounds.’

The report then makes extensive recommendations that call for proper consideration by an international body. Thus having absorbed all that, and having the recommendations before it, what the UN Human Rights Council was asked to do was debate and discuss the report. It refused, a refusal which is breathtaking in its cynicism.

Knowing and understanding what the ‘re-elected’ Xi is capable of is important for Australians. China may be our biggest trading partner but at the same time our own region is at peril. To think otherwise is head-in-sand stuff, thank you Mr Keating, as is any pretence that China is not a gross abuser of the human rights of its own people, as much as it may exhort the world to mind its own business. In spite of the impotence of the U.N,. human rights are an international not domestic concern.

The price will ultimately be paid by those nations who shamefully turn away from the Uyghurs in their time of need in order to derive some benefit from Xi’s China.

So as North Korean dictator and fellow human rights abuser Kim Jong Un sends his congratulations to President Xi and looks forward to a ‘beautiful future’ between their two brutal socialist totalitarian regimes, and as President Putin takes a moment off from bombing and killing innocent Ukrainians to wish his ‘dear friend’ ‘warm congratulations’, let democracies such as Australia continue our free and unfettered dialogue, to discuss and debate the threat posed by those countries who have no regard for the rule of law, who threaten with their weapons and their armies the peace and stability of the world, and persecute, torture, rape and murder their own peoples, even if the United Nations is unprepared to.

Morry Bailes is Senior Lawyer and Business Advisor to Tindall Gask Bentley Lawyers, past president of the Law Council of Australia and a past president of the Law Society of South Australia.