Image: Amnesty International Japan
As we write this post, in various regions of the world women’s NGOs are assembling to prepare for next year’s UN Commission On The Status Of Women which marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995).
Contained within that declaration the following is urged of governments to:
“Take all appropriate measures to eliminate harmful, medically unnecessary or coercive medical interventions…” and that “Acts of violence against women also include forced sterilization and forced abortion, coercive/forced use of contraceptives…” (section D, paragraph 115).
Image: UN Women/Amanda Voisard
Now as is well known China operates a coercive population control program, which despite cynically engineered reports to the contrary targets women with a range of draconian measures, including forced sterilizations , forced medical intervention and forced contraception.
Yet the very same NGOs who will no doubt be praising the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action offer not a word of concern against China’s violations against women’s human and reproductive rights. Since 1995 Women’s organizations and UNCSW have been exposed and challenged for choosing to maintain a silence, offering no criticism, nor condemnation of such medical atrocities. Even though the UN agreement they worked towards, endorsed and approved in 1995 calls for action against such violations!
Image: NYT
Which is why the same organizations will care little about the testimony of Ms Mehrigul Tursun a Uyghur who escaped from a Chinese regime detention center in occupied East Turkistan (so-called Xinjiang). Last November she documented to the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) a range of human rights abuses she had suffered during her imprisonment. These included forced separation from her thee children, all of whom died in Chinese custody and had been medically operated on without her knowledge or approval. She was detained three times and detailed to the CECC being tortured, beaten and electrocuted. Mehrigul also disclosed that on arrival in the USA a full medical examination confirmed that she had also been sterilized! Atrocities which she presented to an Amnesty International conference in Tokyo earlier this month.
Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence 
Please Sisters, stand for one another.
Please ensure that her name is spelled correctly from one sentence to the next.
“Mehrigul Tursun Uyghur woman arrested by the Chinese regime, separated from her three infants who died under Chinese custody and had been medically operated on without her knowledge. Mehrigan was tortured, beaten, electrocuted and forcibly sterilized.”
Gerald, thanks for the headsup on that, good job our working language wasn’t Welsh, otherwise that’d be one mega typographical fest!
I feel so despairing for these women and do not understand how the UN can stay silent
Deeply shocked and suddened by this inhumane treatment and the silence it is surraund by.
These china regime should be kept for them as they have no fear of taking lives of living being. Yiu have no cobceot od God Fear. Stop Torturing other faiths. Shame on you!
I cannot full express my level of discut contemp or anger over this whoever is responsible for killing the infants is the worst creature to walk the earth
The Chinese Government needs to be “Made” “Accountable!” No “Ifs, “Ands”, or, “Buts!” How awful what these women are being put through. This sounds like Nazism all over again! Each EU Government needs to stick together in order to combat what is going on in China! A stop needs to be done now! What are they trying to “Prove?”
It is a fascism, and particularly brutal too. As to holding their regime to account, definitely, but don’t forget also in this case its an ideology and agenda held by UN Women, UNCSW and associated Women’s NGOs that is behind the silence and censorship.
China’s colossal financial and military power means they have now silenced criticism from the UN and from parliaments around the world. China can now commit genocide with impunity. China already owns and controls most of the world’s container ports, energy supply, telecoms networks, and even universities. It is now up to ORDINARY PEOPLE SUCH AS YOU AND ME to confront Chinese individuals, on the street or at work, and to challenge them and hold them to account over these atrocities !
George that happens for sure, but in this case its an ideology and agenda held by UN Women, UNCSW and associated Women’s NGOs that is behind the silence and censorship.
This is heart breaking!! These atrocities must stop!! How is it they can even happen in the first place? We must expose and get rid of these evil practices!!
Tammy, totally agree and each year we do our utmost to lobby and report on this issue and the collective silence of UN Women, UNCSW and associated Women’s NGOs
Silence means complicit😡
Ya Rabb, protect our sisters and brothers, deliver them from oppression and restore humanity to the chinese leaders.
Does any country have faith in the United Nations?
A dismal record, too few occasions it’s been a force for good. In this case though it’s not the structure or procedural limitations of the UN that’s the main issue. Rather an agenda and ideology held by those within UN Women, UNCSW and a considerable number of women’s NGOs who are deliberately turning their backs on this issue.