Beijing’s treatment of Uighurs genocide on all counts: lawyers

The report by more than 50 international experts is the first legal non-governmental examination of a swelling body of evidence.

Uighurs demonstrate against an extradition treaty between China and Turkey outside the Chinese consulate in Istanbul on Monday. Picture: AFP

China’s campaign of persecution against its Uighur ethnic minority has violated every article in the UN genocide convention, an ­independent review has found.

The report by more than 50 international law experts, which runs to 25,000 pages, is the first legal non-governmental examination of a swelling body of evidence on Beijing’s treatment of the Uighurs in the northwestern Xinjiang region. It adds that the government under President Xi Jinping bears responsibility for an “ongoing genocide”.

Under the UN Genocide Convention, a party can be found to have committed genocide if they carried out any of five acts, including murder, displacement and birth suppression, with “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or ­religious group”.

The report by the Newlines ­Institute for Strategy and Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in the US, found that China had committed all five under a campaign orchestrated by Mr Xi. “The intent to destroy the Uighurs as a group is derived from objective proof, consisting of comprehensive state policy and practice, which Xi Jinping, the highest authority in China, set in motion,” the report says.

The five acts of genocide are killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical ­destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Up to two million Uighurs are believed to be held in a network of 1400 internment camps across Xinjiang. China claims the “re-education camps” are part of a counter-extremism campaign after attacks across Xinjiang and other parts of China, attributed to Uighur separatists. On Sunday, Wang Yi, China’s Foreign Minister, said claims of genocide “could not be more preposterous”.

The review cites as evidence repeated reports of targeted imprisonment, systematic torture and sexual abuse, an unknown number of deaths within camps, cultural brainwashing, forced sterilisation, family separation, enforced labour and the removal of Uighur children from their families to state boarding schools. Suicides have become “pervasive” in the camps, it says.

“The persons and entities perpetrating the above-indicated acts of genocide are all state agents or organs — acting under the effective control of the state — manifesting an intent to destroy the Uighurs as a group within the meaning of article II of the Genocide Convention,” the report says.

China is one of 152 countries to have signed the 1948 Genocide Convention, the life’s work of ­Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jew inspired to enshrine the destruction of a people as a particular crime in international law after learning of the Armenian genocide during the First World War.

Under the convention, all signatories have a responsibility to act. “China’s obligations … to prevent, punish and not commit genocide are erga omnes, or owed to the international community as a whole,” the report says.

THE TIMES