cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/48320144
[This is an opinion piece by Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer of Uyghur descent, an international law scholar at Harvard Law School and a senior legal and policy advisor at the Atlantic Council Strategic Litigation Project.]
At Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney drew applause for his plea to middle powers to “build a new order that encompasses values.” ... It was also deeply painful to see Carney feted for his “principled pragmatism” only days after he visited China to forge a new strategic partnership, devoid of any mention of human rights concerns.
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Carney’s embrace at Davos and his appeal to deal with the “world as it is, not as we wish it to be” left me with the question: Will the “new” world order he’s advertising protect everyone, or only those whose suffering is not inconvenient? The old order certainly didn’t. Treating human rights as separate from trade, as if mass atrocity can be compartmentalized to appease China, may have safeguarded commercial interests and avoided friction in the short-term—but it also helped normalize the intolerable.
It’s been 10 years since China began building a sprawling system of concentration camps—designed to bury atrocities behind bureaucracy and beyond tourists’ gaze.
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It’s been three years since the U.N.’s foremost human rights body determined China is committing crimes against humanity. Carney and his “middle power” peers can hardly claim that they didn’t know.
But what happens when China’s façade becomes useful? Even for leaders of the democratic world, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently visited China, it allows suffering to be acknowledged just enough to be set aside, framed as a difference in systems rather than a violation that demands consequence. Public pressure is muted, accountability deferred and appeals for justice quietly absorbed into diplomatic language.
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It's not just Uyghurs; there are Tibetans, Hong Kongers. International law has never protected Taiwan. Its security rests not on legal norms, but on strategic necessity—especially its dominance in advanced semiconductor chips.
Carney argued that middle powers need to unite to hedge against stronger countries, because what we’re living through is not a transition but a rupture in the rules-based order ... The deeper irony is that leaders of the Global South, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s advisor, argued that Brazil would continue working with Europe, China and others who champion multilateralism and international law. It’s unfathomable to square China's status as a champion with its promotion of what Professor Tom Ginsburg described as authoritarian international law.
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An international legal order worth its name is more than just policing borders and battlefields. It must serve as a shield for those hidden from sight, protecting them from the machinery of disappearance, torture, cultural erasure and similar threats.
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Ah yes, use past behavior of others to justify your current behavior. That'll pass moral scrutiny. It was wrong when they did it; it's wrong when China does it.
Thanks for sharing your interpretation. The intent is not to justify current behavior, it's to condemn selective outrage and selective enforcement.
When the police pull over more black people for taillights being out than white people, and send more black people to jail for the same crimes, and kill more black people for the same behaviors, we call that selective enforcement.
So when we have dubious claims of genocide in Xinjiang based on satellite analysis of a German Christian Nationalist who believes birth control is equivalent to murdering babies and should be banned, and then we see people say this is atrocious and no one should be entertaining trade with China, we COULD just take that at face value. But when we seat it in context, we see that they demand no such thing when we have open direct access to literal ongoing genocides we see no such calls for changes in behavior.
Why is that? Why should we embargo Cuba and kill their sick, elderly, and infants but it's OK to support Israel? Obviously you don't believe that we should support Israel, but I am asking about these think-tanks, government officials, parties, and other powerful parties who justify mass murder by referring to "crimes and evils" that are either tiny, specious, or both when compared to their own crimes and evils.
I propose we prioritize intervention into evils based on scale. We can get to Xinjiang when it comes up on the list ordered by the scale of the problem, urgency of irreparable harm, robustness of evidence, and structural relevancy to systemic evil.
And since embargos by the US and EU cause more deaths than literally all wars in the same period, the first priority would be stopping the genocide in Gaza, the second would be to declare all unilateral sanctions illegal and unenforceable and to enforce that ruling with a global military coalition, and the third would be shutting down the US military and limiting them to being only a defensive force of their mainland. Next priorities would be the decolonization of all European-held territories and the establishment of an international protection force for the indigenous peoples everywhere. Then we can send yet another contingent of international observers to Xinjiang to see if this time they can find evidence of a genocide, because the last dozen times no one has found evidence of a genocide and in fact the population in Uyghur population in Xinjiang increased.
I like it. Well formed argument.