China’s repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang is tantamount to “crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International said in a report released on Thursday.
“The Chinese authorities have created a dystopian picture of hell on a staggering scale,” said Agnese Kalamara, general secretary of Amnesty International.
The 160-page report includes testimonies from people imprisoned in internment camps in Xinjiang. The report states that there is “systematic state-organized mass imprisonment, torture and persecution equivalent to crimes against humanity” in the region.
The report documents the measures taken by the Chinese authorities against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities since 2017.
“Muslim minorities face crimes against humanity and other serious human rights abuses,” Kalamara said, adding that these abuses “should shock humanity’s conscience.”
In recent years, thousands of Uighurs have testified about imprisonment in internment camps, which experts see as a campaign for the forced assimilation of minorities. Human rights defenders point out that the people of Xinjiang are forced to work, while women are subjected to forced sterilization.
The Chinese government, for its part, says the camps, which have visited more than a million people since 2017, are “vocational training centers” and aim to eradicate extremism and terrorism.
The Amnesty International report also says that hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps a million or more – have been imprisoned in internment camps and hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned.
All of the approximately 50 former detainees interviewed by Amnesty International said they were detained for activities such as storing a religious image or communicating with someone abroad.
Many detainees said they were first taken to a police station, where they were attached to a chair and interrogated. They said they had been beaten, denied sleep and kept in crowded rooms. In the internment camps, people were robbed of all their privacy and faced severe penalties.
“The Chinese government has made enormous efforts to cover up international human rights abuses in Xinjiang,” Amnesty International said.
The US government has accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. Britain has refrained from making such a statement in Xinjiang, but has joined the United States and Germany in calling on China to end its repression of Uighurs.
“China must immediately dismantle the internment camps and release the people arbitrarily detained there and in prisons,” Kalamara said, calling on the UN to conduct an investigation in accordance with international law.
–
