World

China fumes as US lawmakers call for sanctions over Xinjiang abuses

UN asks Beijing to free Uighurs from camps

August 30, 2018

BEIJING/WASHINGTON/GENEVA — China on Thursday sharply rebuked US lawmakers who called on President Donald Trump’s administration to slap sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the internment of a Muslim minority in the country’s far-west Xinjiang region.

“The US has no right to criticize China on this issue, to be a judge in this regard,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, pointing to America’s own issues with racial discrimination.

“If viewed without bias or prejudice, China’s ethnic minority policies, and the rights and equality ethnic minorities enjoy, are even stronger than in the United States,” Hua said.

“These lawmakers are receiving money from the American taxpayer, they should focus on their job... instead of trying to poke their nose in the business of other countries, trying to be the judge of human rights and even threatening to impose unreasonable sanctions on other countries,” Hua added.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers on Wednesday urged the United States to impose sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses of minority Muslims in Xinjiang, saying the region was being turned into a “high-tech police state.”

The group, led by Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith, Republican co-chairs of the bipartisan Congressional Executive Commission on China, made the call in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Muslims in China’s far western region of Xinjiang were “being subjected to arbitrary detention, torture, egregious restrictions on religious practice and culture, and a digitized surveillance system so pervasive that every aspect of daily life is monitored,” said the letter, signed by 15 US senators and representatives, besides Rubio and Smith.

The letter, signed by nine Republicans, seven Democrats and one Independent, called for sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against senior Chinese government and Communist Party officials overseeing the policies, including Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo, and for other measures to be considered.

The Magnitsky Act was originally designed to target Russian Rights violators, but has been expanded to allow sanctions for abuses anywhere in the world.

“The Chinese government is creating a high-tech police state in (Xinjiang) that is both a gross violation of privacy and international human rights,” the letter said.

China has said Xinjiang faces a serious threat from militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tension between the mostly Muslim Uighur minority who call the region home and the ethnic Han Chinese majority.

Meanwhile in another development, United Nations human rights experts voiced concern on Thursday over alleged Chinese political “re-education camps” for Muslim Uighurs, and called for the immediate release of those detained on the “pretext of countering terrorism”.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination cited estimates that “from tens of thousands to upwards of a million Uighurs” may be detained in the far western Xinjiang province.

Its findings were issued after a two-day review of China’s record, the first since 2009, earlier this month.

China’s foreign ministry rejected the allegations at the time, and said that anti-China forces were behind criticism of policies in Xinjiang.

The independent experts said during the review that the panel had received many credible reports that a million ethnic Uighurs are held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”. Panel expert Gay McDougall described it at the time as a “no-rights zone”.

In its conclusions, the panel said it was alarmed by: “Numerous reports of detention of large numbers of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities held incommunicado and often for long periods, without being charged or tried, under the pretext of countering terrorism and religious extremism.”

It regretted that there was no official data on those detained “for even non-threatening expressions of Muslim ethno-religious culture like daily greetings”.

The panel decried “reports of mass surveillance disproportionately targeting ethnic Uighurs, including through frequent baseless police stops and the scanning of mobile phones at police checkpoint stations”.

There were reports that “many Uighurs abroad who left China have allegedly been returned to the country against their will”, it said, calling on China to disclose the current location and status of students and asylum seekers who went back.

The panel also urged China to allow Tibetans access to passports for foreign travel and to promote the use of the Tibetan language in education, the judicial system, and media. — Agencies


August 30, 2018
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