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China ‘guilty of genocide against Uyghurs’

China has committed genocide by forcibly reducing the birth rate of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, a people’s tribunal in Britain has concluded.

The Uyghur Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC and comprised of various legal and human-rights experts, has issued its final judgment (9 December), which condemns the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The tribunal said that there was “no evidence of organised mass killings”, and rejected comparisons to the Holocaust, but added that it was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that China, "by the imposition of measures to prevent births, intended to destroy a significant part of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as such, has committed genocide”.

Deceive the public

It also found that torture of Uyghurs attributable to the People’s Republic of China “is established beyond reasonable doubt”, as well as crimes against humanity including acts of “deportation or forcible transfer, imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, rape and other sexual violence, enforced sterilisation, persecution, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts”.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in London has dismissed the “pseudo-tribunal” as “nothing but a political tool used by a few anti-China and separatist elements to deceive and mislead the public”.

Forced late-stage abortions

The judgment finds that pregnant women were forced to have abortions even at the very last stages of pregnancy.

In the course of attempted abortions, babies were sometimes born alive but then killed.

Intense monitoring, surveillance, facial recognition and other advanced technologies, specifically targeted at Uyghurs, have turned life into an open-air prison.

Neighbours, members of families and other members of the community were incentivised or coerced in various ways to spy on each other, the judgment continues.

Religious, cultural, political and business leaders have been imprisoned, ‘disappeared’ and, in some cases, known to have been killed or died.

Children as young as a few months were separated from their families and placed in orphanages or state-run boarding schools, and some cases the parents of these children did not know if their children were alive or dead.

Effective sterilisation

A systematic programme of birth control measures forced women to endure removal of wombs against their will and to undergo effective sterilisation by means of IUDs only removeable by surgical means.

Uyghur women have also been coerced into marrying Han men with refusal running them the risk of imprisonment for themselves or their families.

The full judgment is available to read online.