Recently, the US President & the UK PM were considering a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over alleged Uyghur rights violations in China.
While some advocates around the globe are calling for the U.S. and other countries to welcome full boycotts of a diplomatic boycott of 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, others assert that such a decision would only serve to punish athletes who mostly train and compete without much fanfare for the better part of 47 months every four years. Any decision to completely boycott must be made by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, an idea USOPC chief executive officer Sarah Hirshland threw down last month.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is contemplating a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing over the alleged human rights violations in China, media reported. According to the Times newspaper, the UK government is actively discussing the possibility to refrain from sending officials to the Winter Olympics in Beijing, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss believed to be a supporter of the idea. Under one of the considered options, the UK may be represented by the ambassador but not any other official.
Of note, in March, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union imposed sanctions on four Chinese officials and one entity for alleged human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The idea of a diplomatic boycott was also voiced on Thursday by US President Joe Biden and the President confirmed on Thursday he is “considering” a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics amid pressure from activists over China’s many alleged human rights violations and abuses. This would involve big-name delegates from the United States skipping the Winter Games entirely but would not prevent American athletes from participating.
What is China’s Human Rights Violation?
In May 2014, the Chinese government launched the “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang or XUAR) against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. However, they picked up all Uyghur Chinese Muslims and allegedly kept them in a concentration camp-like setting called ‘re-education centers.”
An Uyghur Muslim woman Sayragul Sauytbay, 43 says she was forced to work at a ‘re-education camp’ at China’s Xinjiang province where she was made to teach other prisoners Chinese as part of efforts to indoctrinate them into Chinese culture. She remained there for five months between 2017 and 2018 and testified of the horrors people have to endure inside.
She managed to escape from China to Kazakhstan and later got asylum in Sweden, where she was reunited with her family.
She now describes the horrors she witnessed.
This article is reshared from the Dailymail.co.uk October 2019
During her time at the camp, she saw an elderly woman who had her skin flayed off and fingernails pulled out for a minor act of defiance, a woman who was raped in turn by guards as part of a forced confession, and prisoners who suffered memory losses and infertility after being given mysterious injections.
She described how inmates sleep 20 to a room measuring 50ft by 50ft with a single bucket for a toilet, were routinely starved aside from Friday when they were force-fed pork, and spent hours learning political slogans such as ‘I love Xi Jinping’.
‘Inmates turned into bodies without a soul,’ she said.
Sauytbay told how authorities began taking DNA samples from the Uighurs at the end of 2016, confiscated their phone SIM cards, and put up security cameras in every neighborhood.
The following year, she says she was repeatedly arrested and questioned by police over her husband and children, who were living in neighboring Kazakhstan.
Then, in November 2017, she was bundled into a vehicle and driven to one of the camps where she was made to sign a piece of paper promising to teach her fellow inmates, under penalty of death for failing to comply.
‘The document stated that it was forbidden to speak with the prisoners, forbidden to laugh, forbidden to cry and forbidden to answer questions from anyone,’ she said.
‘I signed because I had no choice, and then I received a uniform and was taken to a tiny bedroom with a concrete bed and a thin plastic mattress.
‘There were five cameras on the ceiling – one in each corner and another one in the middle.’
While her quarters were sparse, they were better than the other inmates who were shackled by the hands and feet even while they slept, and were forced to sleep on their right-hand side or else face punishment.
Punishments were carried out in a so-called ‘black room’, a nickname given to it by the prisoners because they are banned from talking about it.
Sauytbay said tortures included being forced to sit on a chair covered with nails, beatings with electrified truncheons, and having fingernails torn out.
In one case, she said an elderly woman arrived in the camp accused of talking to someone from abroad by phone – even though the woman didn’t own a phone and couldn’t use one.
When she denied her ‘crime’, Sauytbay said she was taken to the ‘black room’ and reemerged later covered in blood, with her skin flayed and her nails gone.
Outlining the average day for prisoners, she said it began at 6am with a wake-up call before breakfast of rice or vegetable soup with a small piece of bread.
After that they were taken for lessons which included learning Chinese, rehearsing propaganda songs, and repeating political slogans praising the Communist party.
After a break for lunch – another meal of soup and bread – pupils were told to ‘confess’ sins including not knowing the Chinese language or cultural traditions.
Those who failed to think of sins or invent some were punished, she said.
After dinner ‘the pupils were required to stand facing the wall with their hands raised and think about their crimes again,’ she added.
‘At 10 o’clock, they had two hours for writing down their sins and handing in the pages to those in charge.
‘The daily routine actually went on until midnight, and sometimes the prisoners were assigned guard duty at night. The others could sleep from midnight until six.’
Rape and gang rape was also frequently used as a weapon against female prisoners, with females under the age of 35 routinely taken to the guard’s quarters at night, without returning until morning.
Sauytbay said she witnessed one woman being brought back to her classroom after being gang-raped and ordered to sit down.
‘She just couldn’t do it, so they took her to the black room for punishment,’ she said.
In another horrifying episode, 200 prisoners were taken to a yard before one woman was ordered to come forward and confess her ‘sins’.
Later, the guards lined up and raped her one after the other while the rest of the prisoners were forced to watch.
‘While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again,’ she said.
She described sanitation at the facility as ‘atrocious’ and said prisoners often got sick, in which case they were denied treatment – while others with pre-existing conditions such as diabetes had their medications taken away.
Instead, they were given mysterious pills and injections which guards claimed would protect them against disease and AIDS, but which Sauytbay believes was a medical experiment.
Those who were treated began suffering memory lapses and became either impotent or infertile.
Sauytbay said she was suddenly released from the camp in March 2018 and sent home, but just three days later was accused of being in touch with someone from overseas and told she would be going back to a camp.
This time she would be thrown in with the general population and would have to stay there for up to three years.
Convinced she would die, she fled her home and ran for the Kazakhstan border, and from there managed to reunite with her family.
She spent more than a year in the country as she tried to apply for asylum three times, but had each attempt knocked back.
In June 2018 she left for Sweden, where asylum was granted and where she now lives with her husband and two children.
Despite her newfound freedom, Sauytbay says her experience in the camp will haunt her for life. ‘I will never forget the camp,’ she said.
‘I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent.
‘I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in, about their suffering. The world must find a solution so that my people can live in peace.’
The Research by Stanford Law School’s Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and Human Rights Watch, along with reports by human rights organizations, the media, activist groups, and others, and internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, confirm that the Chinese government has committed—and continues to commit—crimes against humanity against the Turkic Muslim population.
They have proof that China is harvesting thousands of human organs from its Uighur Muslim minority, UN human rights body hearing said that China is engaged in widespread harvesting of human organs from persecuted religious and ethnic minorities.
China has denied large-scale harvesting of organs though has admitted using executed prisoners’ organs in the past but claims to have stopped in 2015.
According to testimony from the China Tribunal – a pressure group that campaigns on organ harvesting – the government of China has taken hearts, kidneys, lungs, and skin from groups including Uighur Muslims and members of the Falun Gong religious group.
The China Tribunal describes itself as a group of lawyers, academics, and medical professionals. It is backed by End Transplant Abuse in China, an Australian NGO.
Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), crimes against humanity are serious specified offenses that are knowingly committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population. “Widespread” refers to the scale of the acts or number of victims. A “systematic” attack indicates a pattern or methodical plan. Crimes against humanity can be committed during peacetime as well as during armed conflict, so long as they are directed against a civilian population.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, located in China’s northwest, is the only region in China with a majority Muslim population. The Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other communities in the region are ethnically Turkic. Unlike the majority Han Chinese, who are primarily Chinese speakers, the Turkic population is predominantly Muslim and have their own languages. According to the 2010 census, Uyghurs made up 46 percent and Kazakhs 7 percent of the Xinjiang population.
The Chinese government’s oppression of Turkic Muslims is not a new event, but in recent years has reached bizarre levels. As many as a million people have been arbitrarily detained in 300 to 400 facilities, which include “political education” camps, pretrial detention centers, and prisons. Courts have handed down harsh prison sentences without due process, sentencing Turkic Muslims to years in prison merely for sending an Islamic religious recording to a family member or downloading e-books in Uyghur. Detainees and prisoners are subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labor. The oppression continues outside the detention facilities: the Chinese authorities impose on Turkic Muslims a pervasive system of mass surveillance, controls on movement, arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance, cultural and religious erasure, and family separation.
The United States State Department and the parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands have determined that China’s conduct also constitutes genocide under international law. Human Rights Watch has not documented the existence of the necessary genocidal intent at this time. Nonetheless, nothing in this report precludes such a finding and, if such evidence were to emerge, the acts being committed against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang—a group protected by the 1948 Genocide Convention—could also support a finding of genocide.
In 2017, according to official statistics, arrests in Xinjiang accounted for nearly 21 percent of all arrests in China, despite people in Xinjiang making up only 1.5 percent of the total population. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have used various pretexts to damage or destroy two-thirds of Xinjiang’s mosques; about half of those have been demolished outright. Important Islamic sacred sites have been demolished across the region.
As part of regional authorities’ intrusive “Becoming Families” surveillance, development, and indoctrination campaign, officials impose themselves for overnight stays at the homes of Turkic Muslims, a practice that authorities say “promote[s] ethnic unity.” In another particularly chilling practice, some Turkic Muslim children whose parents have been arbitrarily arrested are placed in state institutions such as orphanages and boarding schools, including boarding preschools.
Some governments, such as Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the US, have imposed targeted and other sanctions on Chinese government officials, agencies, and companies implicated in rights violations. Increasingly, governments are joining statements at the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Third Committee, the human rights arm of the UN General Assembly, to condemn Chinese government policy. Nonetheless, many governments, including several members of the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, still praise the Chinese government’s Xinjiang policies.
Throughout 2020, reports of abuses in Xinjiang increased, making it harder for governments to deny or avoid. In June 2020, 50 UN special procedures—special rapporteurs, working groups, and other human rights experts—issued a searing indictment of China’s human rights record, including the Chinese government’s “collective repression” of religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet. The experts called for a special session of the Human Rights Council on China, for the creation of a dedicated UN monitoring mechanism on China, and for UN agencies and governments to press China to meet its human rights obligations.
In October 2020, a cross-regional group of 39 governments issued a stinging public rebuke of the Chinese government’s widespread human rights violations in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet. The statement largely endorsed the call by the 50 UN special procedures. Instead of committing to investigate the allegations, the Chinese government responded with two separate statements, including one on Xinjiang read out by Cuba and signed by 45 countries.
Ensuring justice for serious violations of human rights is the responsibility of the state that has jurisdiction over the area in which the crimes were committed.
Factually, governments that fail to conduct investigations into serious human rights violations generally invoke state sovereignty when other authorities, such as UN bodies or regional bodies, have sought to conduct investigations. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which went into effect in 2002, the court is empowered to investigate and prosecute individuals alleged to be most responsible for grave international crimes, including crimes against humanity, when the state with primary jurisdiction is unwilling or are unable to do so. Then the ICC can undertake a criminal investigation and prosecution if the suspected perpetrators are citizens of a state that is a party to the ICC treaty, if the alleged violations are committed in the territory of an ICC member state, or if a non-member state asks the ICC to consider violations committed on its territory. China is not a party to the ICC statute. While the ICC could assume jurisdiction if the UN Security Council refers the situation in Xinjiang to the court, because China is a permanent member of the Security Council, its veto power could thwart such an action.
Given the gravity of the abuses against Turkic Muslims, there is an urgent need for concerned governments to take strong, coordinated action to advance accountability. One approach would be for a United Nations commission of inquiry (COI) to be established to investigate alleged violations in Xinjiang. The COI should have the mandate to establish the facts, identify the perpetrators, and make recommendations to provide accountability. The COI should be comprised of eminent persons, including experts in international human rights law, crimes against humanity, the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, and gender issues. This COI could be established through a resolution adopted by the UN Human Rights Council, though the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council, and the UN secretary-general are also empowered to take such an action.
This report also sets out other recommendations for concerned governments to increase pressure on the Chinese government to change its abusive policies in Xinjiang, including pursuing individual criminal and state responsibility for these crimes, targeted sanctions, and actions under other UN mechanisms, such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).
Crimes against humanity are considered among the gravest human rights abuses under international law. The specific crimes against humanity documented in this report include imprisonment or other deprivation of liberty in violation of international law; persecution of an identifiable ethnic or religious group; enforced disappearance; torture; murder; and alleged inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering or serious injury to mental or physical health, notably forced labor and sexual violence.
The atrocities that China is inflicting on Turkic Muslims are mind-reeling. If nations ignore this, other countries ruled by dictators will be emboldened to follow in China’s footsteps and humans will start to accept it as the natural law of order, which in reality is not natural but totally out of order and perverted and it is stunning that China is a permanent member of the United Nations!
Rita
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