China: US, UK, Australia Should Be Held Accountable for Human Rights Violations in Afghanistan

Some of the violations, such as numerous unreported killings of civilians committed by the allies during the nearly 20-year deployment, were revealed via the Afghan War logs leak by WikiLeaks in 2010.

Chinese Ambassador to the UN office in Geneva Chen Xu has urged the UN Human Rights Council to study the alleged human rights violations committed by the militaries of the US, UK, and Australia in Afghanistan and to hold these countries responsible for the alleged illegal actions of their troops.

Chen Xu added that the almost 20-year military campaign has shown the world that force is not the way to resolve issues and that "it can only bring great harm to regional stability as well as the human rights of the people concerned".

"Under the banner of democracy and human rights the US and other countries carry out military interventions in other sovereign states and impose their own model on countries with vastly different history and culture", China's envoy to the UN said, adding that such actions had brought about "great suffering".

China's criticism of the NATO military deployment comes as the military alliance is rushing to withdraw from Afghanistan, with the Taliban*, who had earlier seized the majority of the country, pressing to complete the process by 31 August. The military alliance is ending its nearly 20-year campaign, which started as an operation to eradicate al-Qaeda* in the country, but later shifted to other objectives, such as the fight against the Taliban.

The lengthy deployment wasn't scandal-free. In 2010, WikiLeaks released thousands of US documents, related to the military campaign in Afghanistan, which revealed that not only did NATO troops engage in killing unarmed civilians, but they also did not always report these incidents.

A senior Australian soldier drinks beer from a prosthetic leg that belonged to a Taliban fighter killed by special forces in Afghanistan

© Photo : YouTube/ Guardian Australia/Breakingology

Another scandal emerged in 2020, when The Guardian reported that the Australian Army had fired 13 servicemen, after they were purportedly found to have been drinking beer out of the prosthetic leg of a dead Taliban soldier in a bar in Afghanistan. The media outlet claimed that a group of Australian special forces servicemen engaged in the humiliating practice on several occasions in an unofficial pub, called the Fat Lady's Arms, set up on their military base in Afghanistan.

*Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are terrorist organisations outlawed in Russia