On Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which demanded the Trump administration place further sanctions on China for the communist nation’s treatment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
CNN reported that the bill, which received bipartisan support in the House but still needs to be passed in the Senate and signed by President Donald Trump, “recommends targeted sanctions on members of the Chinese government and the Communist Party, as well as bans on the sale of US-made goods to ‘any state agent in Xinjiang.’”
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, China has systematically imprisoned more than one million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. For years, the communist nation denied that it was detaining Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, but earlier this year it finally acknowledged that it was doing so, claiming they were not prisons, but educational facilities.
As former prisoners have explained, however, these are not educational facilities like what people in the West would imagine. One former prisoner said the “re-education” camps use torture and sexual assault to punish those who do not conform. This prisoner also said detainees were being experimented on.
Reports from the international community have shown that China may be using the camps to harvest organs for his “transplant tourism” industry, where wealthy people from around the world travel to China to get organs quickly. China appears to have downplayed the number of organ transplants it performs each year in order to claim it only harvests organs from death-row inmates who volunteer to donate.
Leaked documents from the Chinese Communist Party have shed light on just how the country justifies and carries out its mass detentions. One cache of documents revealed that students returning home from universities would discover their relatives had been taken to the camps. If students questioned why their relatives were taken, authorities were told to threaten them that their loved ones would stay in the camp longer if they asked more questions.
More leaked documents showed that the alleged educational facilities were meant to be run as prisons. One memo said prisoners should never be allowed to “escape.”
The International community has been slow to respond to China’s human rights abuses. Recent bills passed by the U.S. Congress show that may be changing. Yet, there are still some who voted against the bill. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) explained that he voted “no” on the Uyghur Human Rights Act because he didn’t want to “meddle” in the affairs of other countries.
“I voted no tonight on the UIGHUR Act (sanctions against China) for the same reason I voted no in the Hong Kong bill two weeks ago: When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs,” Massie wrote on Twitter.
He followed up that tweet by saying: “Reasonable people can come to different conclusions on this vote but, [b]efore expressing righteous indignation re: my vote against these sanctions, please consider whether you committed enough to the issue that you would personally go a week without buying something made in China”
Reasonable people can come to different conclusions on this vote but,
Before expressing righteous indignation re: my vote against these sanctions, please consider whether you committed enough to the issue that you would personally go a week without buying something made in China
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 4, 2019