2024-04-23 20:06:58
Beijing continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a report released yesterday shortly before his planned visit to China.
The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses around the world in the past calendar year, repeated statements from previous years about the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but its release raises the issue ahead of delicate talks between America’s top diplomat and his Chinese counterparts. , including the war in Ukraine and global trade, BTA reported.
In the introduction to the report, Blinken states that the document “reveals the continuing gross violations of human rights in the People’s Republic of China”.
“In Xinjiang, for example, the PRC continues to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, (uses) forced labor and (commits) other human rights abuses among the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minorities,” Blinken wrote in the report’s introduction. Reuters notes.
The China section of the document dwells in detail on the detention of more than one million people in camps and prisons and the use of re-education camps in Xinjiang, among other violations committed against the wider Chinese population.
China strongly denies wrongdoing in Xinjiang and says it has set up “vocational training centers” to deal with terrorism, separatism and religious radicalism.
When he took office in 2021, Blinken backed his predecessor’s view that China’s actions amounted to genocide and raised the issue with Chinese officials.
Annual human rights reports in recent years have echoed the view that the genocide continues, but the subject of Xinjiang has featured less in direct contacts between US and Chinese high-ranking officials, according to Reuters.