Good morning. We cover the UN human rights chief’s trip to China, India’s expanded protections against sex workers, and Ukraine’s attack in Kherson.
The UN’s heated criticism of China
The top UN human rights official spent six days in China, recommending only limited criticism about China’s persecution of predominantly Muslim minorities.
Michelle Bachelet said her visit was “not an investigation” and she raised questions about China’s adoption of “anti-terrorism and anti-radicalization measures” when she spoke. via video with Xi Jinping, the leader of China.
In doing so, Bachelet was referring to Xinjiang – where human rights groups and academics say China has detained a million or more people in China. catechism camp – in a language favored by Beijing: It has described its program as vocational training to respond to terrorist attacks.
Human rights groups and Uyghurs abroad harshly condemned her remarks. Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, calls for “a credible investigation in the face of mountains of evidence of atrocities, not a toothless dialogue. other”.
Analysis: China’s growing global wobble has translated into growing influence within the United Nations. Critics describe Bachelet’s trip as the latest example of China’s success in cooperation. with multinational organizations, including WHO, confirm parts of the story about Beijing about the origin of the pandemic.
Propagate: It took the authorities a long time to frame the story around her visit, the first by a human rights high commissioner since 2005. State media wrongly cited Bachelet as praising Beijing for “defending human rights”, while officials threatened her family. families of Uyghurs living abroad and called for an investigation.
Business: Companies supplying cotton from Xinjiang are promote visibility into activities to assess widespread forced labor allegations.
Protecting sex workers in India
Prostitution is legal in India, but practitioners often suffer from marginalization, police harassment and abuse. Sometimes, when police search for victims of sex trafficking, they detain prostitutes who have not committed the crime.
Stepping in after a failed legislative attempt, the country’s Supreme Court urged the police to use a more nuanced and humane approach, identified two categories: adult voluntary work consent; and minors, victims of human trafficking and those wishing to leave the industry.
In order to obtain adult consent, police said, arrests and other forms of harassment should be limited, and sex workers should not be separated from their children, the court said. “Police’s attitude towards sex workers is often barbaric and violent,” the court wrote, adding that “police should treat all sex workers fairly. ”
Story: The perception that prostitutes are criminals makes them vulnerable to violence, the researchers say. Traffickers and poverty alleviation have forced the majority of India’s estimated 900,000 sex workers into the industry.
Silingan Coffee, a cafe in a trendy neighborhood outside the capital Manila, is staffed mainly by relatives of those killed in President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs.
“We tell our clients about our lives and how it serves as a healing place for us,” said Sharon Angeles, the head bartender said. “We also tell them, if they are interested, why Duterte’s war on drugs is a war on the poor and not on drugs.”
ARTS AND IDEAS
New Australian DNA tool
In 1942, a lifeless man washed up on the shores of Christmas Island. In the 1990s, the Royal Australian Navy began to suspect he was a sailor on a warship that sank during World War II. But when researchers unearthed his remains in 2006, his DNA did not match the list of possible descendants.
Now, scientists believe they have finally identified sailor using DNA phenotypea technique that can assess the likelihood that someone has certain physical characteristics, like hair or eye color, instead of requiring a DNA match.
In this case, the scientists used it to deduce that the sailor might have had red hair and blue eyes, narrowing down the list of 645 men lost to the ship’s sinking. They find a living relative, and the sailor’s identity: Thomas Welsby Clark.
Australian scientists consider the tool capable of unlocking thousands of unsolved long-term missing persons cases and identifying hundreds of unidentified remains.
But human rights groups have raised serious concerns that DNA phenotyping analysis, which is mainly used by police departments around the world, could lead to racial discrimination. Those concerns extend to Australia, where Indigenous peoples are arrested and imprisoned at disproportionately high rates.
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