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Ahram Online
“China committed genocide in the Xinjiang region by preventing births in the Uyghur population”, a London panel investigating alleged human rights abuses concluded on Thursday.
The tribunal was set up at the request of the ‘World Uyghur Congress’, the largest group representing exiled Uyghurs which lobbies the international community to act against China over the alleged abuses.
Nine lawyers and human rights experts published their opinion after a hearing of allegations of torture, rape and inhumane treatment at two evidence sessions this year. Beijing has criticised the Uyghur Tribunal, which is not affiliated with any government, as an ‘anti-China’ smear and slapped sanctions on its chairman.
“There was no evidence of mass killing, which has been the traditional test of genocide under international law”, the panel said in its 63-page report.
However, the panel said it is “satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intended to destroy a significant part of the Muslim Uyghur minority in the country’s North-West, and as such has committed genocide”.
“The CCP put in place a comprehensive system of measures to optimise the population in Xinjiang to reduce the Uyghur birth rate, including forced sterilisation, birth control and abortion. The population of Uyghurs in future generations will be smaller than it would have been without these policies. This will result in a partial destruction of the Uyghurs”, the report stressed.
Panel chair Geoffrey Nice, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, and the other members acknowledged that the “testimonies” came from people opposed to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the CCP. They also examined thousands of pages of documentary evidence from independent researchers and human rights organisations.
The panel concluded that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, and possibly more than one million, had been detained without cause, and treated cruelly and inhumanely.
“The tribunal is satisfied that a comprehensive plan for the enactment of multiple but interlinked policies targeting the Uyghurs had been formulated by the PRC”, it added, saying “Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials bear primary responsibility”.
The plight of the Uyghurs has contributed to worsening diplomatic relations between Western powers and Beijing, which denies any abuses.
The United States has called China’s treatment of the Uyghurs ‘a genocide’ and is mounting a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing, with several other Western nations.
“Britain would join the boycott”, said British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, on Wednesday. The decision will likely further fray ties with China, after London’s repeated criticism of what it sees as creeping Chinese authoritarianism in Hong Kong.
However, the British government has resisted calls for it to declare China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as genocide, insisting it should be a matter for a court to decide.
The Uyghur Tribunal has no powers of sanction or enforcement. It says “it is for states and other bodies to consider its conclusions and decide whether to act on them”.
