In a shocking new revelation, Former Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee and whistleblower Emma Reilly accused the UN of covering up “special favours” to the Chinese government.
The UN’s “Dangerous Favours” to China
On Tuesday, the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee published written evidence received as part of its inquiry into international relations in the UN. In the evidence, Reilly alleged that the UN has been covering up “dangerous ‘favours’” that the OHCHR rendered to the Chinese government.
She said that these “special” favours “fall into a broader effort of the Chinese government to instrumentalise the UN to serve its national interests.” Reilly further revealed that during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing “paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the General Assembly who ultimately oversaw the process and had significant influence over the final texts put to the Assembly.”
As part of the “secret” conditions imposed across UN agencies on such bribes by China, “the monies so provided may not be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan.”
BREAKING: 🇬🇧 British Parliament releases evidence China paid bribes to two heads of UN General Assembly; whistleblower reveals that top UN Human Rights Council official Eric Tistounet handed Beijing the names of Uyghur and other dissidents who were slated to testify about abuses. https://t.co/1P30li2TQf
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) April 16, 2024
The former OHCHR employess further accused “the Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch in OHCHR, a French national,” of secretly providing China “with advance information on which human rights activists planned to attend the Human Rights Council.”
Further, she said that “UN officials at all levels deliberately lied to member states, including the UK delegation, who enquired about the UN policy of handing names – including of UK citizens and residents – to the PRC without their knowledge or consent.”
Shockingly, Reilly added that “in cases where the PRC was provided with names of NGO delegates in advance by the UN Secretariat, the delegates have reported that family members were visited by Chinese police, forced to phone them to tell them to stop their advocacy, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest for the period of the meeting, disappeared, sentenced to long prison terms without cause, tortured, or, as regards Uyghurs, put in concentration camps.”
She alleges that “in some cases, their family members died in detention. In at least one case, a person named on the PRC’s list, who attended only a side event, later returned to China and died in detention,” and “in at least one case, the Chinese government issued an Interpol red notice against an NGO delegate.”
The evidence also includes allegations that reports of both the WHO and the UNEP on the origins of COVID-19 “were edited to reduce references to the possibility of a laboratory leak.”