Penny Wong ‘dodged’ Uighur victims

Foreign Minister Penny Wong declined to meet Uighur victims of torture and forced sterilisation during their visit to Canberra on Thursday.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Picture: Emma Brasier

Foreign Minister Penny Wong declined to meet Uighur victims of torture and forced sterilisation during their visit to Canberra on Thursday, sending an adviser in her place to hear of their treatment at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Just over a week after Anthony Albanese’s breakthrough talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali, Senator Wong’s office told the World Uighur Congress delegation she was too busy to meet survivors of the Chinese camps in Xinjiang because parliament was sitting.

The delegation met instead with her human rights adviser and Foreign Affairs bureaucrats.

They were told Australia condemned human rights violations in Xinjiang but the government would not label the treatment of Uighurs as “genocide” because that was a call for the International Criminal Court to make.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham, who with Peter Dutton met personally with the group, said it was “disappointing” Senator Wong was unavailable to hear directly of their “shocking and appalling experiences”.

Senator Birmingham said he had offered bipartisan support to the government following the UN’s recent report on Xinjiang to impose targeted “Magnitsky” sanctions on those responsible for the abuse but Senator Wong had declined the offer.

“The Albanese government speaks again and again of condemnation but unlike most like-minded nations, where is the action on Xinjiang?” he said.

“Before the election, Labor talked a big game on the use of Magnitsky-style sanctions and they now enjoy bipartisan support to do so.

“So why the inaction?”

One of the Uighurs, Kalbinur Sidik, said she had been forcibly sterilised in a “concentration camp” where detainees were routinely tortured, forced to sleep on concrete and unable to shower for six months.

She said gang rapes of female detainees were common, and guards used electric batons to ­violate the women: “I am one of the lucky ones to have escaped but there are still millions of my people who are in the camps.”

Several Labor MPs including intelligence and security committee chairman Peter Khalil spoke to the delegation.

Senator Wong’s office said: “The Foreign Minister has made clear the UN findings of serious human rights violations in Xinjiang, some of which may constitute crimes against humanity, are deeply concerning. Australia has consistently condemned human rights violations against the Uighurs and other ethnic and Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and across China.”