United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expected that Beijing would allow the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to conduct a "credible" visit to Xinjiang (East Turkestan).
A statement issued by Guterres' office - who met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Olympic Games in Beijing - said that he expected contacts between Bachelet's circles and the Chinese authorities to allow a credible visit by the High Commissioner to China, to include Xinjiang, where Beijing is accused of violating the rights of the Muslim Uighur minority.
But the report on the meeting, published by the official Xinhua News Agency, made no reference to human rights and Xinjiang.
Bachelet plans to publish a report on Xinjiang, which Western countries and non-governmental organizations are awaiting, and has been demanding Beijing for years to allow it to visit this region "without any obstacles", but it did not receive any positive response.
At the end of January, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian confirmed his country's "readiness" to receive Bachelet in China and Xinjiang.
But Beijing still refuses for the United Nations to conduct any investigation in the aforementioned region, and considers that any visit should be "friendly."
China has faced severe criticism from countries of the world against the backdrop of its practices against the Uighur minority, who live in East Turkestan or Xinjiang, as Beijing calls it and mean the new borders, and have controlled it since 1949.
Human rights organizations say more than a million people in Xinjiang are detained or have previously been detained in political re-education centres.
On the other hand, Beijing objects to these figures and talks about vocational training centers aimed at keeping "trainees" away from extremism.
The United States and Canada have labeled China's campaign against the Uighurs amounting to "genocide" while Washington has also restricted its trade with the region and imposed sanctions on some Chinese companies accused of imposing forced labor among the Uighur community.
Official statistics indicate that there are 30 million Muslims in the country, 23 million of whom are Uyghurs, while unofficial reports confirm that the number of Muslims is about 100 million, or about 9.5% of the total population.