GENEVA — China defeated calls on Thursday for further scrutiny by the top human rights agency of the United Nations over abuses targeting the Uyghur people and other Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region.

The United States and nine other Western countries had called for a debate in the U.N. Human Rights Council on a landmark assessment released in August by Michelle Bachelet, then the U.N. rights chief, which found China may have committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, in northwestern China.

The resolution failed by a vote of 19 to 17, with 11 of the council’s 47 members abstaining. To make the resolution easier for developing countries to support, the nations pushing for debate carefully avoided any reference to the findings of the August report and limited their objectives to a council debate.

وقالت السفيرة الأمريكية ، ميشيل تيلور ، للمجلس: "لا يوجد بلد ممثل هنا اليوم لديه سجل مثالي في مجال حقوق الإنسان". "لا ينبغي استبعاد أي دولة ، بغض النظر عن مدى قوتها ، من مناقشات المجلس - وهذا يشمل بلدي ، الولايات المتحدة ، ويشمل جمهورية الصين الشعبية."

كان النقاش حول شينجيانغ هو الحد الأدنى من الخطوات التي يمكن أن يتخذها أعضاء المجلس ردًا على تقرير الأمم المتحدة. وقد حدد التقرير التعذيب والعنف الجنسي وقمع الحرية الدينية وحالات الاختفاء على نطاق واسع.

“Today China is targeted, tomorrow any other developing country could be targeted,” Mr. Chen said. All country-specific resolutions in the council, he added, focus on the developing world.

Those arguments  resonated with habitual council allies such as Cuba, Eritrea and Venezuela, but also overcame doubts among Muslim countries. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, voted against further debate, as did Pakistan, which often speaks in the council on behalf of the 57-country Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Among Muslim states only Somalia supported the resolution. 

The vote was not a surprise for Western diplomats who had previously acknowledged that it would be close but had opted to risk defeat rather than remain silent on the atrocities exposed in the Xinjiang report. The report, produced after much delay and in the face of pressure from Beijing, was issued in the final hours of Ms. Bachelet’s tenure.