A public tribunal established by a prominent British human rights lawyer determined on Thursday that China has committed genocide and crimes against humanity in its current and ongoing treatment of the Uyghur (or Uighur) people.
As Live Action News has reported, China has been implementing forced abortion, sterilization, and birth control on Uyghur Muslims. The government is also using the Uyghur people for forced labor, and is torturing and killing them. Two million Uyghurs are estimated to be held in concentration camps.
The intention has been to reduce the population of Uyghur Muslims, and the tribunal’s chairman, attorney Sir Geoffrey Nice, stated that a group of nine lawyers, academics, and people in the business sector have released a 63-page tribunal judgment discussing their findings.
“On the basis of evidence heard in public, the tribunal is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the People’s Republic of China, by the imposition of measures to prevent births intended to destroy a significant part of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as such, has committed genocide,” the judgment states, according to NBC News.
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China has denied any mistreatment of Uyghurs or other ethnic minority groups, claiming that all people are treated equally. However, the tribunal, which does not have government backing and is not legally binding in any country, said that China has engaged in raping, sterilizing, torturing, imprisoning, and deporting Uyghur Muslims. Experts and witnesses testified to these horrors.
One of the most noteworthy testimonies given was from Shemsinur Abdighafur, a former nurse who became a doctor in Uyghur traditional medicine. She fled China for Turkey in 2010, fearing for her life. She told the panel she witnessed repeated forced abortions and the murders of newborns, and routinely hid pregnant women in her home or found safe houses for them.
“In my time working in hospitals, we could sometimes hear that some babies were born, and they started crying and from this we knew they were alive,” she said. “But we knew all babies would be given the injection so we knew they would die before they got home.”
Muetter Iliqud is a project assistant for Uyghur Transitional Justice Database, which tracks missing and imprisoned Uyghurs and has documented 530 detention facilities for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. She explained, “The world needs to know about what Uyghurs are facing today. There is a genocide going on. There are millions of people being locked out in these so-called re-education camps and thousands of people are missing.”
The tribunal report states that President Xi Jinping and other senior officials “bear primary responsibility” for these crimes against humanity. “This vast apparatus of state repression could not exist if a plan was not authorized at the highest level,” it said.
A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said that the evidence against China has been falsified and that this is nothing more than a political campaign to “smear China.”
On Monday, the White House announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics scheduled for February citing China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.” But more must be done to stop the horrors China has been inflicting for decades.
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