United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet will visit China, including a trip to Xinjiang, after reaching an agreement with Beijing, she said on Tuesday. “I am pleased to announce that we have recently reached an agreement with the government of China for a visit,” Bachelet said in a video address to the UN’s Human Rights Council, adding that the trip is expected to take place in May. “The government has also accepted the visit of an advanced [Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights] team to prepare [for] my stay in China, including a visit to Xinjiang and other places. This team will depart for China next month,” Bachelet said. The UN’s top human rights official has been negotiating with Beijing since September 2018 about a visit to Xinjiang, where some 1 million mainly Uygur Muslims are alleged to have been held in mass detention camps. China has defended its policies in the region, saying they are designed to counter terrorism and extremism. As recently as last week, a spokeswoman in Bachelet’s office said the discussions were “ongoing” , and “the parameters for a visit will have to be such that the high commissioner has unfettered, meaningful access, including unsupervised interviews with civil society”. The Post reported in January that China had agreed to host Bachelet “in the first half of the year after the Beijing Winter Olympics” . Beijing also insisted that Bachelet’s office hold off on publishing a report into Xinjiang ahead of the Games, as requested by Washington, sources familiar with the situation said. “China also made clear that it wants to define the trip as a friendly visit instead of an investigation with the presumption of guilt,” sources said in January. Beijing Olympics official calls reports of Xinjiang forced labour a ‘lie’ Bachelet said she “remained concerned about the treatment of individuals” by local and national authorities, “some of whom have faced restrictions of the freedom of movement, including house arrest, or in some cases have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment based on cumulative challenges stemming from their activities”. “My office has raised a number of such cases with the government and encouraged the authorities to take steps to ensure that freedom of expression and opinion are fully respected and protected,” Bachelet said. Chen Xu, the Chinese ambassador to the UN in Geneva, told the Human Rights Council that China welcomed Bachelet’s visit to Xinjiang in May. “The freedom of speech of Chinese citizens is fully protected under law,” Chen said in a video message. “China is a rule-of-law country. Freedom of speech cannot be used by anyone as an excuse to be above the law.” Ahead of Bachelet’s announcement, 192 human rights and advocacy groups published a joint open letter calling on her office to publish its report on Xinjiang. The letter said independent voluntary experts at the UN Human Rights Council had raised concerns in 2020 about religious and civil rights in Xinjiang, as well as over human rights advocates who had been held under “residential surveillance”, a form of secretive detention at an unknown location without access to family or a lawyer. “In contrast to these efforts, we have been concerned by the relative silence of your office in the face of these grave violations, aside from procedural updates on the status of negotiations to gain meaningful access to Xinjiang,” they said in the letter. EU to fine supply chain human rights abuses; but what about Xinjiang? Kenneth Roth, executive director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the groups were increasingly concerned that the OHCHR report had yet to be published. “The release of the report without further delay is essential – to send a message to victims and perpetrators alike that no state, no matter how powerful, is above international law,” Roth told the UN Human Rights Council at a meeting in Geneva. “Today’s announcement of a planned visit by the high commissioner should not provide an excuse for her to avoid publishing her report on Xinjiang abuses without further delay, as she has repeatedly promised.” “A spokeswoman from Bachelet’s office however said there was no further information available about the release of the UN’s report on Xinjiang.” Additional reporting by Jack Lau