United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet capped her landmark trip to China on Saturday by calling on Beijing to review all its counterterrorism and anti-radicalisation policies to make sure they complied with international human rights standards.
In the southern city of Guangzhou, Bachelet said China and her office agreed to form a working group to exchange views on the rights of minorities and human rights in relation to counterterrorism, the internet and legal protection.
The six-day trip - the first to China by a UN human rights high commissioner since 2005 - took Bachelet to Kashgar and Urumqi in the far-western region of Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has been accused of forced sterilisation and mass internment of members of the Uygur ethnic group and other Muslim minorities.
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China has denied the allegations, saying the internment camps are vocational training centres for deradicalisation and to tackle terrorism.
Bachelet said she went to one of the centres, which closed in 2009 and had since become a school, asking its former vice-president about human rights concerns.
She said that while she could not assess the full scale of the "vocational education and training centres", she told Beijing she was concerned about the lack of independent judicial oversight of the facilities' operations, allegations of the use of force, and "unduly severe restriction on legitimate religious practices" inside the centres.
"In the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, I have raised questions and concerns about the application of counterterrorism and deradicalisation measures and the broad application, particularly the impact on the rights of Uygurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities," she said.
Before her trip, the US State Department said it was "deeply concerned" about the visit because it did not expect China to grant the access needed to conduct a complete and independent assessment of human rights in Xinjiang.
Bachelet also went to a men's prison in Kashgar, where she visited cells, a hospital and a court. The prison was "pretty open and pretty transparent", she said, and authorities there were able to answer all of her team's many questions.
But she said the prisoners were not necessarily incarcerated for offences related to terrorism or extremism.