China is accused of killing Uighur in Xinjiang, court rules | Uighur Stories

London, United Kingdom – The Chinese government has carried out massacres, civil cases and tortures of the Uighur people and other minorities in the western region of Xinjiang, an illegal and independent UK court has ruled.

Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, head of the Uighur Court and a well-known human rights lawyer, said the Chinese government was cracking down on Uighur Muslims with contraceptive and contraceptive methods to reduce the group’s population.

“The Court is convinced that the People’s Republic of China, in implementing measures to prevent the birth of those who want to destroy the vast majority of Uyghur in Xinjiang, has committed atrocities,” said Nice, who also led the case. of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on war crimes and genocide.

He added that “this great tool of government repression would not exist if the system was not approved to the highest degree”.

The court has no jurisdiction and no power to punish or punish China. But experts say it will help persuade governments around the world to respond to China’s threats.

Chinese authorities have illegally confiscated one million Uighurs and small groups in 300 to 400 places in Xinjiang, the largest religious minority group since WWII.

The US and a number of other countries have announced what China has done as a genocide. But the United Kingdom refused to do so.

China has repeatedly condemned the atrocities

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in Xinjiang, and it has refused to investigate or allow independent authorities to do so.

The court was set up in September last year with the help of the NGO Coalition for Genocide Response to investigate the “ongoing violence and killings” of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims.

Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague (ICC) announced in December 2020 that it was not investigating because China is not participating in the trial. Whereas the International Court of Justice, the United Nations Supreme Court, can only take a case that has been approved by the UN Security Council, while China has the power to vote.

“Civil society organizations needed to take action and create a court – that’s what the Uighur court is,” said Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Coalition for Genocide Response and consultant for the World Uyghur Congress.

The court has “conducted an in-depth study of the evidence of the Uighur crisis which each organization, including the governments, has found,” Pulford added.

Survival platform

One of the “difficult tasks” of the court has been to provide a platform for survivors, Sophie Richardson, China’s director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), said.

“It created an opportunity for the public to report back to the country and to inform the public of ongoing cases,” he said.

More than 30 Witnesses – including Uighur refugees, lawyers and students – testified at three meetings last year.

Their testimony included reports of beatings, rapes, and tortures in Xinjiang – home of millions of Uighurs and other Muslim sects.

Uighur Muslims have been “subjected to horrific atrocities, atrocities and atrocities,” Nice said in a ruling on Thursday.

“Up to 15 people are housed in a 22 square meter room, it is impossible to sleep on concrete,” he said.

Nursiman Abdureshid, a 33-year-old Uighur refugee living in Istanbul, told the group in June that his father had been sentenced to more than 16 years in prison for “disorderly conduct and criminal conspiracy”, and that his mother had been betrayed. imprisonment for 13 years for “premeditated criminal activity”.

He said he had heard through the Chinese ambassador to Turkey that he had been arrested because “he must have had a criminal motive”.

“That means there is no crime, and my family has done nothing … The government selects people randomly and relocates them from camps to prisons,” said Abdureshid, who has not been able to contact his family since 2017.

Abdureshid also spoke of forcing his brother-in-law to have an abortion for his twins for fear of reprisals as he already had two children.

Adrian Zends, a senior, co-founder of China Studies at the US-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told the group in November of his review of the results of China’s family planning policies.

His research shows that such measures could reduce the number of ethnic minorities south of Xinjiang by one-third over the next 20 years.

According to Chinese statistics, the birth rate dropped by 48.7 percent in Xinjiang sub-district between 2017 and 2019.

What’s next?

The Chinese government did not respond to a request for comment by the court. Although the court has no jurisdiction, Beijing has filed sanctions against the court and its organizers, including Sir Nice, for publishing so-called “lies and slander” about the country.

Pressure from the Chinese government prompted witnesses to choose not to testify for fear of reprisals against their families.

“CPR provided the court from day one,” De Pulford said.

The Uighur tribunal has called on the UK government to take action, such as increasing sanctions on China, imposing sanctions on Uighur slaves and openly condemning the killings in Xinjiang.

De Pulford said the ruling should be transformed into a “facilitator” for governments to act in accordance with their laws under the Genocide Convention Act – an international legal instrument that gives states the responsibility to protect and prosecute genocide.

The ruling “removes any excuses” to prevent governments from taking action, de Pulford said.

In the more than 50 years since the UK adopted the Genocide Law Act, it has not recognized any killings taking place.

Continuing to denounce global violations of China’s human rights and the neglect of Beijing’s 2022 Winter Games, which the UK, US and Canada recently announced, is not enough to change China’s policies, said Richardson of HRW.

“It is important that we establish the Chinese national outcomes that human rights law requires,” he said.

“Failure to respond to criminal misconduct by the second world power does not necessarily justify such torture.”