A watchdog organization has accused the UN Special Rapporteur on sanctions who recently visited Iran of receiving $200,000 from China to help whitewash its ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs.
The UN Watch, self-proclaimed as a non-profit organization dedicated to holding the United Nations accountable to its founding principles, said on Wednesday that Alena Douhan, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, last year received $200,000 from China according to disclosures buried in an 83-page UN document.
She secured the donation while she was using her UNHRC mandate to legitimize "the most extreme forms of Chinese disinformation", a Chinese-sponsored propaganda virtual event with the banner, “Xinjiang is a Wonderful Land”.
Covering up China’s herding of one million Uyghurs into camps by falsely portraying Xinjiang as a utopia, Douhan appeared on the show along with the Chinese ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Chen Xu, who claimed that "people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang...live a life of happiness”.
On Wednesday, Dohan concluded a controversial 11-day visit to Iran in which she rejected appeals by Iranian rights activists to meet dissidents and turned a blind eye to the regime’s crackdown on the ongoing protests.
She chose instead to blame Iran’s poor human rights conditions on sanctions imposed by the US and other Western states in her report, that was hailed by the Islamic Republic’s authorities.
Since her appointment in March 2020, Douhan has mainly campaigned against the United States and its allies’ sanctions policy. She is a professor in Lukashenko-controlled Belarus State University, and has not criticized human rights violations in her native country.
