(Photo credit: SFT HQ Students for a Free Tibet)
The UK Government says it will continue to work with its international partners to hold China to account for its gross violations of human rights against Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang. It has introduced sanctions, tackling Uyghur forced labour in UK supply chains, and we are ramping up pressure on Beijing through UN human rights bodies. But unlike the US and Canada, it refuses to declare that China has committed genocide in its repression measures in Xinjiang
Classic genocide has been committed in the autonomous region by the Chinese state that includes not just killing and carrying out crimes against humanity but deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part on Uyghur Muslims.
This has included imposing documented measures intended to prevent births and forcibly transferring their children. There have been instances of not only causing serious bodily or mental harm but also mass internment, slave labour, systematic rape, torture and live organ harvesting, mass sterilisation, womb removal, forced abortion, secretly located orphan camps, brainwashing camps and psychological trauma of these combined atrocities that accounts to genocide under any definition.
The horrors have been recounted in a debate in the House of Commons last month largely due to several Tory MPs led by Nusrat Ghani and Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who has been sanctioned by China for speaking out against the ill-treatment.
It was a retaliatory move after the UK imposed sanctions on Chinese officials deemed responsible for the human rights abuses. Yet Boris Johnson’s Government, who is seen as no friend of Muslims, remaining unwilling to act further.
Johnson has not only watered down an inquiry about the extent of Islamophobia within his own party but refuses to have any official relationship with representative groups. On continuing Palestinian injustices, he has yet to take issue with the human rights abuses by Israel and its ceaseless occupation of Palestinian territories.
Despite the UK’s special status towards India, there has been no attempt to bring the nationalist government of Narendra Modi to account for passing discriminatory legislation that could lead to millions of Muslims being stripped of their citizenship rights and disenfranchised. There has also been a failure to act about the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in
Myanmar, also a former British colony.
“The United Kingdom is committed to seeking an end to serious violations of international human rights law wherever they occur, preventing the escalation of any such violations and alleviating the suffering of those who are affected,” Minister for Asia Nigel Adams insisted at the end of the Parliamentary debate.
“We are also committed to ensuring that, where allegations are made, they are investigated thoroughly, including, where appropriate, independent international investigation by relevant bodies and experts.” But it is only words; no appropriate relevant action will be taken including a symbolic boycott of the forthcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing.