based in the US, found China had committed all five under a campaign orchestrated by President Xi. “The intent to destroy the Uighurs as a group is derived from objective proof, consisting of comprehensive state policy and practice, which Xi Jinping, the highest authority in China, set in motion,” the report said.
The five acts of genocide are killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Up to two million Uighurs are believed to be held in a vast network of 1,400 internment camps across Xinjiang. China claims the “re-education camps” are part of a counter-extremism campaign after a series of attacks across Xinjiang and other parts of China, attributed to Uighur separatists. On Sunday, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said genocide claims “could not be more preposterous”.
The review cites as evidence repeated reports of targeted imprisonment, systematic torture and sexual abuse, and an unknown number of deaths, with camps, cultural brainwashing, forced sterilisation, family separation, enforced labour and the removal of Uighur children from their families to state boarding schools. Suicides had become “pervasive” in the camps, it said.
“The persons and entities perpetrating the above-indicated acts of genocide are all state agents or organs — acting under the effective control of the state — manifesting an intent to destroy the Uighurs as a group within the meaning of article II of the Genocide convention,” the report said.
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