According to an unofficial tribunal in the United Kingdom, China has committed genocide against Xinjiang’s Uyghur population.
The U.K.-based Uyghur Tribunal referenced the use of birth control and forced sterilization allegedly imposed by the Chinese Communist Party against the Muslim Uyghur minority as the primary justification for this conclusion, according to the BBC.
Sir Geoffrey Nice chaired the tribunal hearings, and said that the panel believed China had carried out “a deliberate, systematic and concerted policy” to bring about “long-term reduction of Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations.”
It was noted that the tribunal panel also believed senior Chinese officials — including President Xi Jinping — were primarily responsible for these human rights abuses. While Sir Geoffrey said that there was “no evidence of mass killings” in the Xinjiang region, the use of birth control and sterilization amounted to genocidal intent.
“The panel also said it had found evidence of crimes against humanity, torture, and sexual violence against the Uyghur people,” the BBC added.
A spokesman for the Chinese Communist Party described the organization as a “pseudo tribunal,” acting as a “political tool used by a few anti-China elements to deceive and mislead the public.”
“The British government said the evidence needed to be assessed by a competent court, well it doesn’t get more competent than this,” said former Conservative Party leader and co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, Sir Iain Duncan Smith. “The government now needs to stop messing around. The genocide taking place in Xinjiang has got to dominate our relationship with China.”
“Since launch the Tribunal has attracted significant press and other interest reflective of the gravity of the issue,” the Uyghur Tribunal states on their website. “The Uyghurs are a predominantly Turkic Muslim group and in the Uyghur region are estimated to number upwards of twelve million people.”
“It has been widely reported that the PRC is detaining a significant proportion of the Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations in camps which the PRC says are ‘vocational training centres’ or ‘re-education centres’ but are widely alleged to be involuntary detention centres which some have likened to ‘concentration camps,’” the tribunal continued. “There have been numerous other allegations of the PRC subjecting the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim Populations to killings, serious bodily or mental harm including torture, rape and other sexual violence, enslavement, forced separation of children from their parents, forced sterilisation, forcible transfer or deportation, apartheid, forced labour, forced organ harvesting, enforced disappearances, destruction of cultural or religious heritage, persecution, forced marriages and the imposition of Han Chinese men into Uyghur households.”
“If proved, some of these allegations could lead to the conclusion that the PRC has embarked on a campaign intended to destroy, in whole or in part, the Uyghur people and their existence as a religious, racial, national and ethnic group,” the statement concludes. “Such a finding would constitute the commission of Genocide as defined in Article 2 of the Convention of 1948 to which the PRC is a signatory and ratifying state. Acts arising from or incidental to the prohibited acts of Genocide, may also in themselves constitute crimes against humanity.”