GENEVA/BEIJING – The United Nations has accused China of holding as many asa million Uighur and other Muslim people in a vast web of detention campsin the far western Xinjiang province.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressedalarm over “numerous reports of detention of large numbers of ethnicUighurs and other Muslim minorities held incommunicado and often for longperiods, without being charged or tried, under the pretext of counteringterrorism and religious extremism”.
Its findingslinkwereissued after a two-day review of China’s record, the first since 2009.
China denies such internment camps exist but says criminals involved inminor offenses are sent to “vocational education and employment trainingcentres”. “The argument that ‘a million Uighurs are detained inre-education centres’ is completely untrue,” Chinese representative HuLianhe this month told the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of RacialDiscrimination in Geneva.
“As for certain counterterrorism and stability maintenance preventivemeasures, I think that internationally this is in general use by lots ofcountries,” she added.
On the other hand, a United Nations committee in Geneva examining China’srecord on racial discrimination rebuffed Beijing’s denials of there-education camps and called on it to acknowledge the existence of thefacilities and release those who are being detained.
In a report released on Thursday, the committee dismissed China’sjustifications that it faced a terrorist problem in the Xinjiang provinceas nothing more than “a pretext” for detaining the Muslim minorities.
In its submission to the UN committee earlier this month, China said that“there are no such things as re-education centers or counter-extremismtraining centers in Xinjiang,” but did note the region faced a terrorismproblem. It said the claims that a million Uighurs were being held inre-education centres were “completely untrue.”
A bipartisan group of 17 US lawmakers, meanwhile, urged the Trumpadministration to sanction Chinese officials and companies allegedlyinvolved in the detention centres. The Trump administration has shown awillingness to sanction officials using the Global Magnitsky Act.
In December, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on Gao Yan, aChinese police official in Beijing, for denying medical care to Cao Shunli,a human rights activist who died in custody. Another alleged human rightsabuser hit with sanctions is Myanmar general Maung Maung Soe, who wasaccused of the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people.