UK Government Accuses China Of Gross Abuse Of The Uighur Muslim People In Xinjiang Province

Image Courtesy of VOA

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had accused Chinese officials of committing “gross, egregious” abuses in the northwestern Xinjiang province.

China has warned it will deliver a “resolute response” to any move by Britain to sanction officials involved in the alleged human rights abuses against the country’s Uighur population.

Mr Raab said he would also be updating MPs on Monday on the Government’s response to the imposition by the Chinese government of a draconian new national security law on Hong Kong.

Claims that a million, perhaps as many as 3 million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic groups have been rounded up and driven into these camps have been made by credible human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and accepted by the United Nations and others.

Satellite images show the scale of the camps, and British diplomats visited Xinjiang in August last year and confirmed that reports are “broadly accurate.”

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has described Xinjiang as “a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy, a sort of a no rights zone… [where] members of the Uyghur minority, along with others who are identified as Muslim, are being treated as enemies of the State based solely on their ethno-religious identity.”

Reports of forced sterilisation and wider persecution of the Muslim group were "reminiscent of something not seen for a long time", the UK would work with its allies to take appropriate action, he insisted.

Liu Xiaoming the Chinese ambassador, told the BBC's Andrew Marr show,  that the Uighurs received the same treatment under the law as other ethnic groups in his country.

Shown drone footage that appears to show Uighurs being blindfolded and led to trains, and which has been authenticated by Australian security services, he said he "did not know" what the video was showing and "sometimes you have a transfer of prisoners, in any country".

"There is no such concentration camps in Xinjiang," he added. "There's a lot of fake accusations against China."

It is believed there are about one million Uighur people and other mostly-Muslim minorities detained in China, in what the state defines as "re-education" camps.

China previously denied the existence of the camps, before defending them as a necessary measure against terrorism, following separatist violence in the Xinjiang region.

The authorities have recently been accused of forcing women to be sterilised or fitted with contraceptive devices in an apparent attempt to limit the population, prompting calls for the UN to investigate.