British Parliament charges Chinese government with genocide of Uyghurs
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British Parliament accused the Chinese Communist Party of committing genocide against the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in north-western China. Chinese government officials are lashing out at the charge.
“The accusation that there is genocide in Xinjiang is a monstrous lie fabricated by international anti-China forces,” Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Friday. “The U.K. has enough problems of its own. British lawmakers should manage their own business and do more practical things for their constituents.”
The UK passed the resolution just weeks after several Western powers joined together to sanction the human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in China. China responded by imposing sanctions on various Western officials.
“Those sanctions were an attempt to silence and intimidate us, to prevent us from raising the growing evidence of the abuse faced by the Uyghurs,” Conservative Member of Parliament, Nusrat Ghani, said while leading the debate Thursday.
“The fact that we are here today having this debate shows that the sanctions simply have not worked,” she continued.
Ghani and her colleagues argued that the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of the Uyghurs qualified as genocide for meeting all five criteria points under international law.
She cited the rampant sexual abuse committed against Uyghur women and the plummeting birth rates of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the homeland of the Uyghur ethnic group.
“I do not believe there is any other place on earth where women are being violated on this scale,” Ghani stated. “Despite the region accounting for just 1.8% of China’s population, 80% of all birth control device insertions in China were performed in the Uyghur region. That explains why, in one of the regions, birth rates are down 84%. Even more chillingly, China no longer shares the data by ethnicity as it tries to scrub away the evidence. Time is running out for the Uyghur, especially the women.”
Chinese officials responded by contesting the right of one country to “arbitrarily” determine whether another country is committing genocide.
“No country, organization, or individual is qualified or entitled to determine arbitrarily that another country has committed ‘genocide,'” the Chinese Embassy in London stated. “In international relations, no country should use this accusation in a political game of rumor-mongering and malicious manipulation.”
Ghani argued that China’s international influence has allowed them not to be held accountable or be taken to court concerning the atrocities against the Uyghurs.
“Every route to a court is blocked by China,” she explained. “Men and women in this House, the mother of all parliaments, will do all we can to ensure that atrocities like the Holocaust can never again take place.”