According to the Chinese government, the primary human right is to have an enjoyable life – and nowhere demonstrates its laudable desire to spread a little happiness better than the Western province of Xinjiang.

Last week they sent a letter to the United Nations describing this region – home to about 12 million Uighurs – as a beautiful nirvana where ‘people of all ethnic groups are living a happy life in peace and contentment’.

Thanks to their noble efforts, they said, everyone in Xinjiang can ‘enjoy social stability, economic development, cultural prosperity and religious harmony’. 

This is a highly significant moment. ‘Claiming ignorance is no longer an option – failure to act now is wilful complicity in genocide,’ Rahima Mahmut, the UK director of the World Uighur Congress, texted me shortly after publication.

Activists such as Rahima and survivors of horror have spent years trying to wake up the world to the atrocities, barbarities and cruelties inflicted on their people by the Chinese government – and now it is official.

True to form, Beijing tried to block and bully Michelle Bachelet, the UN Human Rights Commissioner who wrote the report. First it tried to control her visit in May to Xinjiang, then it pursued delaying tactics to frustrate publication, before finally dismissing her document as a smear and sending out that ridiculous letter.

In reality, few parts of our planet are more miserable than Xinjiang. For it has been turned into hell on earth by a repulsive Communist dictatorship trying to crush the culture, language, religion and traditions of its indigenous communities.

At least a million Uighurs have been sent to concentration camps where they are brainwashed, drugged and tortured.

Families are routinely broken up, children snatched from parents, women forced into late abortions and sterilisation.

We know from leaked documents that President Xi Jinping, the hardline nationalist dictator, personally ordered this crackdown that combines modern technology with medieval savagery.

He sent in his hand-picked henchman to oversee the clampdown. Chen Quanguo trialled their tactics in Tibet, cracking down on its Buddhist religion and gentle traditions so harshly that it led to scores of self-immolations in protest.

Under their regime’s reign of terror in Xinjiang, it is deemed a crime for citizens to study scripture, grow a beard, complain about poverty or travel overseas.

Cameras, checkpoints and facial recognition technologies are placed everywhere. Entire villages have been rounded up and despatched to camps. Survivors talk of gang rapes. 

Thousands of mosques and shrines have been destroyed. I have reported for this paper on the horrific stories of people sent into the gulags. ‘When the officers picked out the prettiest girls, you knew what was going to happen,’ said one camp survivor.