China

Uyghurs subjected to genocide by China, unofficial UK tribunal finds


Uyghur people living in Xinjiang province in China have been subjected to unconscionable crimes against humanity directed by the Chinese state that amount to an act of genocide, an independent and unofficial tribunal has found.

Hundreds of thousands and possibly a million people have been incarcerated without any or remotely fair justification, the tribunal’s chairman Sir Geoffrey Nice QC said as he delivered the tribunal’s findings in London. “This vast apparatus of state repression could not exist if a plan was not authorised at the highest levels,” Nice said.

The UK-based Uyghur Tribunal is comprised of lawyers, academics and businesspeople. It has no government backing or powers to sanction or punish China, but its organisers hope the process of publicly laying out evidence will compel international action to tackle alleged abuses against the Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group.

The tribunal’s report said crimes including torture and the systematic suppression of births had occurred. Nice said China’s treatment of the Uyghurs amounted under the Geneva conventions to an intent to destroy all or part of a group physically or biologically, a judgment he said largely rested on the suppression of births.

In response to the findings, a cross-party group of British MPs urged the Foreign Office to re-examine its refusal to join the Biden administration and declare a genocide in Xinjiang.

Nice said that although some Uyghurs have been killed in detention, and have suffered greatly in re-education camps, there was no evidence of mass killings and that comparisons with the Nazi holocaust were unhelpful.

Those detained were instead largely freed after re-indoctrination, Nice said, as part of a central government plan, ordered at the very highest levels, to reintegrate Xinjiang province and break up every aspect of Uyghur culture.

“Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs – with some estimates well in excess of a million – have been detained by PRC [People’s Republic of China] authorities without any, or any remotely sufficient reason, and subjected to acts of unconscionable cruelty, depravity and inhumanity,” the tribunal’s report said. “Sometimes up to 50 have been detained in a cell of 22 sq metres.”

The tribunal’s report said there was evidence that detainees had been confined in containers up to their neck in cold water, shackled by heavy metal chains and immobilised for months on end. It said some of the udetained had been subjected to extreme sexual violence, including gang rapes and penetration with electric shock rods and iron bars. Women were raped by men paying to be allowed into the detention centre for the purpose, the report said.

The extreme intrusive capacity of the Chinese state, including mass coerced labour assignments, intense monitoring and face surveillance, meant parts of Xinjiang became a form of open prison, the report said.

The tribunal also found evidence of enforced abortions, the removal of wombs against women’s will, the killing of babies immediately after birth and mass enforced sterilisation through the enforced insertion of IUD devices that were only removeable by surgical means.

“Across the 29 counties with indigenous-majority populations for which we have 2019 or 2020 data, the birth-rate has fallen by 58.5% from the 2011-2015 baseline average,” the report said. “In those counties that are over 90% indigenous, the birth-rate fell at an even greater rate, showing a 66.3% decrease in 2019-2020.”

Hundreds of thousands Uyghur children were taken from their families and placed in Han-ran boarding schools, burial grounds bulldozed or built over, mosques destroyed, and religious practice banned, it added.

Nice said the tribunal would have been unnecessary if an international court had been asked by fearful governments to investigate the allegations, adding there was an obligation to know the falsity or truth of fellow human suffering and breaches of international human law.

He insisted the tribunal had been determined to apply universal standards, act on the basis of proof beyond reasonable doubt and make every effort not to be ill-disposed to communism or the Chinese Communist party. The tribunal received no cooperation from the Chinese state, and instead some of its members have been subject to sanctions by the Chinese state, leading to their withdrawal from the process.

During a press conference this week, Zheng Zeguang, China’s ambassador to the UK said: “The so-called witnesses the organisers have put together are merely actors who have been making up the so-called persecution that never happened at all.”

Zheng added that he had asked the UK government “to stop the organisers from continuing such malicious behaviour”.

The tribunal’s report was published the day after the US House of Representatives voted 428 to 1 to ban imports from Xinjiang over concerns about forced labour.

Responding to the vote, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that “the so-called forced labour and genocide in Xinjiang are entirely vicious rumours” and accused the US of using Xinjiang-related issues to “spread rumours under the guise of human rights and engage in political manipulation and economic bullying”.

Australia, the US and the UK have declared they will mount a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing winter Olympic Games next year. France has so far refused to do so.



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