China is committing genocide in Xinjiang province by preventing birth defects in the Uighur population, a London commission investigating human rights abuses in the region said Thursday. Nine lawyers and human rights experts released their opinions after hearing allegations of torture, rape and inhuman treatment at two evidence-gathering meetings this year.
The tribunal was set up at the request of the World Uighur Congress, the largest organization representing the exiled Uighurs from China, which is urging the international community to take action against China for abusing the ethnic-religious minority.
Beijing has criticized the Uighur tribunal, which is not affiliated with any government, as an “anti-Chinese” defamation and has imposed sanctions on the chairman.
In a 63-page report, the panel said there was no evidence of mass killing of the population.
The Communist Party has established a “comprehensive system of measures to ‘optimize’ the population in Xinjiang” to reduce the Uighur birth rate, including forced sterilization, contraception and abortion.
“The population of Uyghurs in future generations will be smaller than it would have been without this policy. This will lead to the partial extermination of the Uyghurs,” they added. “In accordance with the use of the Genocide Convention in the word ‘extermination’ it carries out the prohibited act required to prove genocide.”
Committee Chairman Jeffrey Nice, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, along with other members, admitted that the testimonies were heard from people opposed to the communist government in China. But they also examined thousands of pages of documentary evidence from independent researchers and human rights organizations.
The commission concluded that hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, and perhaps more than a million, were arrested for no reason, and treated cruelly and inhumanely. Its members said they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that torture had taken place “by or on their own initiative, or with the consent of government officials or other persons acting in official positions in the government or the Communist Party.”
It also confirmed the allegations of imprisonment, abduction, forced disappearances, rape and sexual violence, persecution and inhumane acts: The responsibility. “
The plight of the Uighurs has contributed to an escalation in diplomatic tensions between the Western powers and Beijing, which denies any human rights violations.
The U.S. called China’s conduct with the Uighurs a “genocide,” and declared a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing, which was joined by several other Western countries.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said yesterday that Britain would join the boycott, but the British government opposed calls to declare China’s treatment of the Uighurs as genocide, insisting it was a matter to be decided in court.
The Uyghur tribunal has no sanctions or enforcement powers and says other states and bodies should consider its conclusions and decide whether to act on them.