China’s Uyghur crackdown breaches ‘every single provision’ of UN genocide convention: report
The ruling Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of the Uyghur people in China’s Xinjiang province has violated “every single provision” in the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank has found.
American news outlet CNN obtained an advance copy of the report by more than 50 global experts in human rights, war crimes and international law. The report, conducted by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, will be published on Tuesday. It is the first time a non-governmental organization has undertaken a study on the accusations of genocide in China’s northwest region.
The Chinese Communist Party “bears state responsibility for an ongoing genocide against the Uyghur in breach of the (UN) Genocide Convention,” the report said, according to CNN.
The report considered thousands of testimonies from exiled Uyghurs and official Chinese government documents as evidence. Up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have been detained in the 1,400 internment facilities scattered across Xinjiang since 2014, the report found. Beijing refers to those facilities as vocational training or reeducation centers.
“Former detainees allege they were subjected to indoctrination, sexually abused and even forcibly sterilized,” CNN cited the United States State Department as saying.
Experts attributed the decline in birthrates in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2018 to the local government’s use of abortion, sterilization and other methods to control birth among the population. They criticized the Chinese authorities for trying to eradicate the Uyghur culture by allegedly removing textbooks about Uyghur culture, history and literature from classes for schoolchildren in Xinjiang.
“I think a lot of Uyghurs will take this report as a long overdue recognition of the suffering that they and their family and friends and community have gone through,” Rian Thum, a report contributor and Uyghur historian at the University of Manchester, told CNN, describing Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang as “one of the great acts of cultural destruction of the last century.”
Established in 2019, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy is formerly known as the Center for Global Policy and aims to strengthen the U.S.’s foreign policy.
The four-page UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which came into force in 1951, aims to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and in peacetime. China would be immune from prosecution even if it is found violating the treaty, as the convention does not specify any specific penalties for offenders.
Click
here for Chinese version
---------------------------------
Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app:
bit.ly/2yMMfQETo download the latest version,
Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play