Religious freedom advocates praised President Trump for signing into law a Uighur rights bill only hours after former adviser John Bolton accused the president of advising Chinese President Xi Jinping to keep them in concentration camps.
The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act sat on Trump’s desk since late May, when a bipartisan majority passed it through both the House and the Senate in a near-unanimous vote. The law enshrines human rights for Uighurs in U.S. policies toward China and requires Trump to levy sanctions against Chinese party leaders in Xinjiang, where many Uighurs are interned in camps.
When Trump signed the law, Nury Turkel, the first Uighur commissioner at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a State Department-sponsored watchdog, praised the president for fighting human rights abuse.
“It is a great day for American citizens as well as Uighur and other Turkic people in China who have been subject to ghastly human rights abuses by the Communist Party of China,” Turkel said in a statement.
The passage of the law also received praise from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was one of its original co-sponsors.
“President Trump took a historic step in support of Uighur Muslims worldwide and against China’s egregious human rights abuses and probable crimes against humanity,” Rubio said. “As the Chinese government and Communist Party continues its mass internment of at least a million Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities, the United States will hold the CCP and its enablers accountable for their heinous crimes.”
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, who amended the act to include sanctions on Chinese leaders in Xinjiang, also praised the law’s passage, saying that the U.S. can no longer “remain silent in the face of these atrocious and horrifying abuses.”
“With the passage and signing of this legislation, the U.S. is making a powerful statement against these violations, and I urge the Trump administration and Secretary Pompeo to make a swift determination on further sanctions,” he said.
Trump’s signing of the law came a week after the State Department released its annual International Religious Freedom report, in which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo excoriated China for its continued repression of Uighurs.
“In China, state-sponsored repression against all religions continues to intensify,” Pompeo said during the report’s release. “The Chinese Communist Party is now ordering religious organizations to obey CCP leadership and infuse communist dogma into their teachings and practice of their faith. The mass detentions of Uighurs in Xinjiang continues.”
Yet, Bolton’s accusation, which stated that Trump, during a 2019 meeting with Xi in Japan, told the Chinese president through interpreters that he should “go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do,” overshadowed the law’s signing.
New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, who, along with Rubio, was the bill’s other original co-sponsor, said that Bolton’s accusations about Trump’s relationship with Xi and China were “disturbing.”
