A former employee of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has claimed that the United Nations has been covering up "dangerous favours" it carried out for China. The evidence submitted by Emma Reilly ranges from illegal detentions to a COVID-19 cover up.
Emma Reilly, a former employee of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has claimed that the United Nations has been covering up "dangerous favours" it carried out for China. In a report issued by the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, the former OHCHR employee has highlighted a "nexus" between the Human rights agency and the Chinese government.
In the evidence accessed by the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, Reilly has stated that the "dangerous favours" carried out by the OHCHR "fall into a broader effort of the Chinese government to instrumentalise the UN to serve its national interests”.
The whistleblower has also alleged that Beijing bribed two successive Presidents of the UN General Assembly during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Reilly's evidence also alleges that the Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch in OHCHR, who is a French national "was secretly providing China with advance information on which human rights activists planned to attend the Human Rights Council".
The evidence further alleges that UN Officials at all levels deliberately lied to member states, including the UK delegation. At that time, the UK delegation had raised an enquiry about the UN policy of handing names of UK citizens and residents to China without any prior knowledge or consent.
Reilly's evidence also stated 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”.
In some cases, Reilly added that that family members died in detention and in another case, an Interpol red notice was issued against an NGO delegate.
She added that the level of self-censorship regarding the favours to China went up to the level of Secretary-General, who told her "that any resolution of my case would be ‘difficult,’ expressly due to the fact the favours I reported were accorded to the PRC."
Reilly's evidence also states that reports from the World Health Organisation and the UN Environment Programme on the origins of COVID-19 were "edited to reduce the references of a laboratory leak".
The evidence also includes a report from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which reported that China is working towards "shaping the multilateral system to align more with a state-centric, authoritarian world view". The FCDO also mentions the "disruptive role" of Russia and how Iran is "using its position in the IAEA to disrupt and push back against its legal obligations".
Along with Reilly and FCDO, Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, China Strategic Risks Institute, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, Hong Kong Watch, the Foreign Policy Centre and the Council on Geostrategy have also provided evidence for this UN-level cover up.