UN whistleblower claims OHCHR is giving China “dangerous favors,” and there is a cover-up ahead of a UK Parliament investigation

London, United Kingdom: Emma Reilly, a former employee of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), has made a crucial disclosure in which she accuses the UN of having a troubling connection to the Chinese government.

Written testimony obtained by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK Parliament is now available for public consumption as part of the committee’s investigation into multilateral international relations.

In his capacity as a whistleblower, Reilly said that the OHCHR has been giving the Chinese government “dangerous ‘favours,'” which “fall into a broader effort of the Chinese government to instrumentalize the UN to serve its national interests.”

According to her testimony, there has been a “UN cover-up of special favours for China,” the Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK Parliament was told in a news release.

Reilly said that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the General Assembly who ultimately oversaw the process and had significant influence over the final texts put to the Assembly” “during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals.”

China “imposes a secret conditionality across UN agencies that the monies so provided may not be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan,” according to her findings.

“The Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch in OHCHR, a French national, was secretly providing China with advance information on which human rights activists planned to attend the Human Rights Council,” according to the charges in her written testimony.

Inquiring into the UN policy of providing names to the PRC without their knowledge or approval, the UK delegation was among the member states to whom it is alleged that “UN officials at all levels deliberately lied,” the announcement said.

In cases where the UN Secretariat gave China the names of NGO delegates ahead of time, according to her evidence, the delegates have reported that family members were visited by Chinese police, forced to call and tell them to stop their advocacy, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest for the duration of the meeting, disappeared, sentenced to long prison terms without cause, tortured, or, in the case of Uyghurs, placed in concentration camps.

“In some cases, their family members died in detention,” the accuser claims. At least one instance involves a person on China’s list who just attended a side event before returning home and dying away in custody. According to her, “the Chinese government issued an Interpol red notice against an NGO delegate in at least one case,” it further said.

Reilly claims that the Secretary-General “expressly believes that because the favors I reported were granted to the PRC, any resolution of my case would be ‘difficult,'” and that “self-censorship extends to the Secretary-General.”

The information supports the claims that “reports on the origins of COVID were edited to reduce references to the possibility of a laboratory leak,” according to both the WHO and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

A contribution from the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) is also included in the evidence. China is attempting to “shape the multilateral system to align more with a state-centric, authoritarian world view,” according to the information presented by the FCDO, the announcement said.

Russia “plays a mostly disruptive role across the multilateral system,” according to the FCDO. The FCDO notes that “Iran uses its position within the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to disrupt and push back against complying with its legal obligations, and often runs in multilateral elections” when discussing the involvement of isolated nations in the multilateral system.

In addition to individual specialists and academics like Bill Browder, organizations that have presented testimony include the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, China Strategic Risks Institute, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, Hong Kong Watch, the Foreign Policy Center, and the Council on Geostrategy.

The Foreign Affairs Committee heard testimony from whistleblower Reilly and other expert witnesses, including Lord Malloch-Brown, at 14:00 today, April 16, during the first evidence session of this investigation.

The Committee’s investigation of international relations within the framework of the multilateral system examines the ways in which a wide variety of nations use multilateral organizations, whether by cooperating with them, circumventing them, or obstructing them.

According to the statement, it is a follow-up to the Committee’s report “In the room: the UK’s role in multilateral diplomacy,” which found that autocratic states were trying to aggressively co-opt strategically significant multilateral organizations and radically rewrite their guiding principles.