China seeks to subvert rules-based international order by taking over UN: Whistleblower

China seeks to subvert rules-based international order by taking over UN: Whistleblower

LONDON: China is aiming to reshape the rules-based international order to reflect its own priorities by taking over multilateral institutions such as the UN, evidence submitted by a UN whistleblower claims. The evidence presented claims Beijing was influencing votes at the UN to squelch discussions on topics sensitive to it and that it even bribed two General Assembly presidents.

In doing so Beijing seeks to de-prioritise the rule of law, democracy and human rights, a former employee of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), British citizen Emma Reilly, has alleged in written evidence submitted to the foreign affairs committee, a panel of MPs which scrutinises the foreign office. It is carrying out an inquiry into international relations in the multilateral system.

In her written evidence, published Tuesday, Reilly exposes how Beijing influences the OHCHR to not raise certain issues and “exerts significant pressure” on senior UN officials and staff to modify their reports to remove negative references to China.

“Reports of both the WHO and the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) on origins of Covid were edited to reduce referenced to the possibility of a lab leak,” she claims.

She said an OHCHR report on the treatment of Uyghurs contained significant edits from the Chinese govt and claims that UN staff were secretly giving China the names of human rights activists who planned to attend the Human Rights Council to talk about China human rights abuses.

She said these people then found their family members in China were visited by Chinese police, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest, tortured, disappeared or put in concentration camps.

“Beijing’s consistent demand for meetings and apologies following even the mildest criticism have served to ensure even relatively independent UN officials to not publicly criticise China, or even raise human rights concerns privately. This results in a perverse situation where democracies that permit dissent are much more regularly criticised by the UN’s human rights and humanitarian agencies than autocratic regimes,” she said.

Reilly, who was dismissed from her job for blowing the whistle, said Beijing, through development assistance, was influencing votes at the UN to, for example, shut down discussions on Xinjiang. She said, “During the two-year negotiation of the SDGs (2013-2015) Beijing paid bribes to two successive presidents of the General Assembly which had significant influence over the final texts put to the Assembly… such that the content of the final goals and indicators closely aligns with Beijing’s approach — devoid of civil and political rights and freedoms.”

In recent years China has successfully campaigned for its nationals to lead or obtain very senior management posts on a significant number of UN departments programmes and agencies. “No other member state has a strong presence across the most senior management of almost every UN agency,” she said.

The evidence also includes a submission from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) which says that China is working to “shape the multilateral system to align more with a state-centric, authoritarian world view, and to robustly defend itself against criticism.”

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