China has committed genocide in the Xinjiang region by preventing births among the Uyghur population, a London panel investigating alleged human rights abuses concluded on Thursday.
Nine lawyers and human rights experts have published their opinion after hearing allegations of torture, rape and inhuman treatment at two evidence hearings this year.
The tribunal was created at the request of the World Uyghur Congress, the largest group representing Uyghurs in exile, which is lobbying the international community to act against China over the alleged abuses.
Beijing rejected his findings and said Congress “paid for liars, bought rumors, and gave false testimony in an effort to concoct a political tool to smear China.”
“This so-called tribunal has no legal qualification or credibility,” the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said, calling the hearings a “political farce.”
In a 63-page report, the panel said there was no evidence of massacre, which has been the traditional test of genocide under international law.
But he said he was convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “intended to destroy a significant part” of the Uyghur Muslim minority in the northwest of the country and that as such “has committed genocide”.
The CCP has implemented “a comprehensive system of measures to ‘optimize’ the population of Xinjiang” to reduce the Uyghur birth rate, including forced sterilization, birth control and abortion.
“The population of Uighurs in future generations will be smaller than it would have been without these policies. This will lead to partial destruction of Uighurs,” he added.
“Consistent with the Genocide Convention’s use of the word ‘destroy’, this satisfies a prohibited act required for proof of genocide.”
“Xi Responsible”
China has imposed sanctions on panel chairman Geoffrey Nice, who prosecuted former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at the United Nations tribunal in The Hague.
He and the other members acknowledged that testimonies came from people opposed to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the CCP. But they also reviewed thousands of pages of documentary evidence from independent researchers and human rights organizations.
The panel concluded that hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, and possibly more than a million, had been detained without cause and treated cruelly and inhumanely.
He stated that he was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the torture had taken place “by or at the instigation of, or with the consent or acquiescence of public officials or other persons acting as official of the PRC and/or the CCP”.
She confirmed the allegations of imprisonment, forcible transfer, enforced disappearances, rape and sexual violence, persecution and inhumane acts on the same level of evidence.
“The court is satisfied that a comprehensive plan for the enactment of multiple but interrelated policies targeting the Uyghurs has been formulated by the PRC,” he added, saying that President Xi Jinping and other senior officials “in bear the primary responsibility”.
Impact on diplomacy
The fate of the Uyghurs has contributed to the deterioration of diplomatic relations between Western powers and Beijing, which denies any abuse.
The United States has called on China to address the genocide of the Uyghurs and is organizing a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing with several other Western countries.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain would join the boycott, in a move likely to further strain ties after repeated criticism from London over what he sees as creeping Chinese authoritarianism in Hong Kong.
But the British government has resisted calls to declare China’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide, insisting it should be up to a court to decide.
The Uyghur court has no sanctioning or enforcement powers and says it is up to states and other bodies to review its findings and decide whether to act on them.
– TIMES/AFP
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by Phil Hazlewood, AFP