The Chinese government breached “each and every act prohibited” by the United Nations Genocide Convention in its treatment of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, according to an independent report published on Tuesday.
The first-of-its-kind legal analysis by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a think tank located in Washington, D.C., looks at allegations of oppression of the Uyghurs and other religious minorities in Xinjiang in western China. An estimated 1 million to 2 million Uyghurs have been placed in detention centers across the region.
The Chinese Communist Party “bears state responsibility for an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in breach of the [U.N.] Genocide Convention,” the nongovernmental organization determined in its 55-page report, which was put together with the help of “dozens of experts in international law, genocide studies, Chinese ethnic policies, and the region.”
Although Chinese officials have denied charges of there being a genocide and defended their “vocational education and training centers” as efforts to combat terrorism, Uyghur survivors have described being insulted, beaten, abused, and raped by guards for their religious beliefs.
STATE DEPARTMENT: CHINA ‘WAS’ COMMITTING UYHUR GENOCIDE BUT WON’T SAY IF IT IS ONGOING
According to the U.N. Genocide Convention, which was approved in 1948, there are five different categories of actions that a group can perform “with an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” that would be classified as genocide.
These five types of actions include “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.”
The report concludes that all five of these statutes have been violated by China, but it makes no recommendations for punitive action.
“We believe the conclusions are clear and convincing. We do not make any recommendations for action, but we do stand prepared to share our information and analysis with relevant institutions or actors interested in these findings,” Azeem Ibrahim, director of special initiatives at Newlines and co-author of the report, wrote in the forward.
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In the case of the genocides that took place in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunals were established by the U.N. to determine whether genocide had taken place. But the U.N. Security Council has to approve the tribunal, and with China as a permanent member of the council with veto power, such a tribunal will likely never take place to investigate these alleged crimes.
“The highest levels of State — the President of China and the XUAR CCP Secretary and CCP Deputy Secretary — directly orchestrate these coordinated policies and practices, which are relentlessly implemented by a bureaucratic line of entities and officials all the way down to the internment camp guards,” the report states.
