Women and children in China facing repression, female activists tell UN
Sep 29, 2023
Geneva (Switzerland), (ANI) Sept 29: Female human rights activists from Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong jointly highlighted China’s forceful repression of women calling it the worst human rights violations in the country. They mentioned China’s 2023 review by the UN Women’s Rights Committee during a side event at the 54th UN Human Rights Council titled “Findings of the UN Women’s Rights Committee on China: Perspectives of affected communities”. The Committee of the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in its final observations based on experts’ recommendations in May this year asked the Chinese government to ensure the protection of women’s rights to comply with the Convention. The Committee listed a series of areas of concern and recommendations. It included abolishing the coerced residential (boarding) school system imposed on Tibetan girls and authorise the establishment of and subsidizing private Tibetan schools. Related to Uyghur women in Xinjiang province, the CEDAW recommendations asked China to end, prevent and criminalize the use of coercive measures, such as forced abortions, forced sterilizations, other forms of gender-based sexual violence, and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading family planning practices that are allegedly inflicted on women in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and in predominantly Uyghur-populated areas. The UN also recommended in the report that China must ensure girls and women belonging to ethnic minorities have access to instruction in their mother tongue, such as Tibetan, Uighur, and Kazakh, and reverse the closure of schools providing instruction in minority languages.
