UN report calls China's torture of Uyghur Muslims as "crime against humanity"

Geneva: Just 11 minutes before her term ended at midnight on Wednesday, UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet said China committed "serous human right violation" against the nation's minority Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province.

Bachelet's damning report, according to The Guardian, was delayed by China's concerted efforts to stop its publication until the last moment.

When the report came out, China quickly called it an anti-China smear, while Uyghur human rights groups hailed it as a "turning point".

The 45-page report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) highlighted "arbitrary and discriminatory detention" of the minority group as a treatment amounting to "international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity".

The Chinese government countered saying the report was "based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces", according to The Guardian.

As well as its rejection of the report, China release a 121-page counter-report, emphasizing the threat of terrorism as the main reason behind establishing "deradicalisation" and "vocational education and training centres" in Xinjiang.

Meanwhile, Omer Kanat, the executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project pressure group, called the UN report a "game changer for international response to the Uyghur crisis".

The Guardian described the extent to which the Uyghurs have been subjected to torture over the past five years in what China termed "training centres".

Although some of these centres have been closed, hundreds of thousands are there still being incarcerated.

In several hundred cases families had no idea about the fate of relatives who had been detained, The Guardian reported.

Alongside, two-thirds of the 26 former inmates at China's "training centres" interviewed by UN investigators reported that they have been subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment.

There were beatings with electric baton, extended solitary confinement, and waterboarding among other tortures.

The US and some other countries called the Chinese excess including incarceration, destruction of mosques, forced abortion and sterilization as amounting to "genocide".

However, the UN report according to the Guardian does not mention "genocide" but highlights allegations of torture by Uyghurs as "credible".