Dec 09, 2021

Special Uyghur Tribunal Investigating Internment Camps Finds Chinese Communist Party Guilty Of Genocide


The independent Uyghur Tribunal in London has found the government of the Peoples Republic of China guilty of committing genocide in its policies in the so called “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).” After almost 18 months of work, examination of large volumes of evidence, including testimonies of victims and witnesses, the tribunal found that the systematic imprisonment, forced sterilization, torture and repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic-peoples by the Chinese government were being carried out with the intent to eliminate them.

The UNPO welcomes the judgment of the Tribunal. It calls on the international community to respond through national level recognition of genocide, the prosecution of responsible officials through national or international tribunals, and through other economic and diplomatic measures designed to stop this ongoing genocide.

The Uyghur Tribunal is a non-governmental body of experts established in 2020 to fill the gap left by inaction of the international community to investigate the crimes being committed in the so-called “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)”, known to the Uyghur people at East Turkestan. It is chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who led the case against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in the International Court for the Former Yugoslavia. Since June 2020 the Uyghur Tribunal has listened to numerous testimonies and gathered data on the internment camps and other policies established by the Chinese government in East Turkestan against the Uyghur people and other Turkic-peoples living there.

In a summary of the Final Judgment released this Thursday 9th of December, and read out by Sir Geoffrey Nice, the Tribunal declared that they were "[...] satisfied that the PRC (People's Republic of China) has affected a deliberate, systematic and concerted policy with the object of so-called 'optimizing' the population in Xinjiang by the means of a long-term reduction of Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations to be achieved through limiting and reducing Uyghur births".

The Tribunal elaborated that while there was no evidence of mass killings, there was strong evidence of several extreme breaches of human rights law sufficient to find genocide. These include internment without proper trial; torture; forced starvation and malnutrition; numerous accounts of rape and forced sterilization. All these crimes feature under articles of international human rights law and the Genocide Convention, to which PR China is a signatory. The tribunal found that the evidence showed that these human rights violations were perpetrated with the full intent to elminate the Uyghur people through rape, torture, forced sterilization, forced assimilation, destruction of their language, culture, norms and freedom of expression, and other methods of population destruction.

Sir Geoffrey Nice stated that it was important to recognize that the Tribunal was not initialized as a way to judge the regime itself and its nature, as some critics and witnesses claimed. Indeed Sir Geoffrey highlighted that it would “[…] be errant to conceive of the Tribunal’s work as the examination of a bad state to see quite how bad it is”.Nevertheless, it was the state of China, and the Chinese Communist Party, that was found to be directly responsible for intending to destroy the Uyghur people . Key Chinese Communist Party figures such as President Xi Jinping or Chen Quanguo, the head of the Autonomous Region, were named as being responsible with significant roles in the setting up of the internment camps and policies surrounding them.

The UNPO welcomes the judgment of the Tribunal. It calls on the international community to respond through national level recognition of genocide, the prosecution of responsible officials through national or international tribunals, and through other economic and diplomatic measures designed to stop this ongoing genocide.