In its weaponizing of them, US violates human rights

[Photo by Song Chen/China Daily]

This is an editorial from China Daily.

In its list of the outcomes of the 50th Session of the UN Human Rights Council that it released on Tuesday, the US State Department claimed the country had shone "a spotlight on countries of concern, promoting accountability for governments and actors that abuse human rights, and addressing human rights issues across the globe".

The list is testimony to the hypocrisy with which the United States tries to lay claim to the moral high ground on the pretext of "advancing respect for and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms".

Having orchestrated the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the US still has the audacity to brag about its participation in multiple interactive dialogues related to the human rights situation in Ukraine.

With chaos engulfing Afghanistan after the Biden administration withdrew the US military from the country, which was as irresponsible as its invasion of the country 20 years ago, the US has no shame in saying that it is "alarmed by human rights abuses in Afghanistan", and attributing them to the Taliban.

If the US really cared about the human rights situation in Afghanistan, it would not have invaded the country at the cost of thousands of lives; it would not have embedded its puppet regime there; it would not have simply walked away from it after finding its "experiment" a failure; and it would not have refused to return the $7 billion of Afghan state assets it held, especially after the country was in such dire need of the money for humanitarian purposes after it was hit by a devastating earthquake.

And the US still has the nerve to list condemning China's human rights conditions as one of its achievements at the UN human rights body's session, despite having no grounds for doing so, and despite the Uygurs and other ethnic groups in China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region being indiscriminately affected by its "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act", which tries to decouple Xinjiang from the world market.

The world knows that weaponizing human rights is part of the Biden administration's China strategy. Be it Xinjiang, Tibet or Hong Kong, the US has done nothing but damage the human rights conditions in these places. The US has a record of engineering coups in foreign countries, as former White House national security advisor John Bolton admitted to the media on Tuesday. But the US should know that trying to do that in China is futile.

Exchanges on human rights between developed and developing countries should not be the former lecturing or dictating to the latter. Rather than weaponizing human rights, the US should engage in dialogue with other countries with a view to improving the human rights conditions of the world as a whole.

As a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, the State Department's list should be called a record of the US' violations of human rights as that is truer to its contents.