Xinjiang official hails regional human rights progress at UN

China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region has made remarkable achievements in protecting human rights and providing vocational training to "educate and save" people influenced by religious extremism, a senior Xinjiang official told a United Nations session in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday.

Arken Tuniyaz, an ethnic Uygur and vice-chairman of the region, spoke to some 500 representatives at the ongoing 41st UN Human Rights Council session.

He said that from the 1990s to 2016, ethnic separatism, religious extremism and violent terrorism had been working from bases inside and outside China to plan and carry out incidents of terror and violence in Xinjiang, which caused enormous damage to society.