Uyghur activists stage a protest outside of the UN Offices at Geneva during the review of China's rights record by the United Nations Human Rights Council, on January 23, 2024. (Keystone/AFP/Fabrice Coffrini)

Two years after UN Xijiang report, China sidesteps scrutiny. In 2022, a scathing United Nations report about abuses in Xinjiang triggered a storm of scrutiny on Beijing’s human rights record. Two years on, little has been done to raise the issue again at the UN level. Yet, reports of abuses are ongoing, according to human rights groups, which warn that China has built a legal framework to outlaw Uyghur’s right to express their cultural and religious identity.

💰$426M FOR LEBANON. Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the appeal was aimed at providing food and other essential supplies to one million people directly affected or displaced by the crisis, based on estimates from the Lebanese authorities. But he warned that with the latest developments “things could get worse”.

What he said: “If there is one universal truth in humanitarian affairs, it is that it is infinitely easier and faster to break things and hurt people than it is to fix them.”

The backdrop. His comments came as Israel launched a ground offensive into southern Lebanon on Tuesday after escalating airstrikes that have reportedly killed over 1,000 people in the country in the last two weeks alone. Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the UN rights office, said it continued to warn Israel against a large-scale invasion, saying such a move would “engulf the entire region in a humanitarian and human rights catastrophe”.

⛓️’SYSTEMATIC TORTURE’. A UN commission of inquiry on Ukraine said on Tuesday it had gathered more evidence that Russia has systematically tortured Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs), while Russian POWs have also reported torture or ill-treatment by Ukrainian authorities.

Harrowing accounts. Over the past 18 months, since its last major report, the three-member probe body interviewed 174 Ukrainian POWs that have been released and “almost every single one provided credible accounts of torture”, it said in a report that has been submitted to the Human Rights Council.

In testmonies gathered during 99 field visits between 1 March 2023 and 31 August, victims described being severely beaten, deprived of sleep, given electric shocks, attacked by dogs and subjected to sexual violence. Danielle Bell, the head of the mission, told journalists in Geneva that the routine nature of the abuses, documented across several facilities in both Russia and Ukrainian occupied territories, indicated that supervisors were aware of this treatment and could have prevented it. Russia has denied mistreatment of prisoners of war.

📖Our encounter with one of them: ‘Fighting for their release keeps me strong’: Ex-Ukrainian POW on mission to reveal horrors of Russian captivity

Russian captives also tortured. Over half, or 104, of the 205 Russian POWs interviewed since March also gave accounts of torture or ill treatment by Ukrainian authorities, in almost all cases during the initial phases or the first few days of their internment. Ten captives reported sexual violence. The commission said the abuse “occurred almost entirely in unofficial or transit locations and typically ended upon arrival at internment facilities where the UN conducted interviews with captives”.

“My team continues to have unimpeded access to POW internment facilities inside Ukraine and this has fostered an open dialogue with the authorities and led to improvements,” Bell said.

– By Kasmira Jefford