An Uyghur tribunal is reportedly looking into China's purported criminal offenses against Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Turkic Muslim people.
According to ChinaAid, the ruling of the Uyghur Tribunal will be released in London on December 9. The verdict will be discussed in a news conference after the hearing.
ChinaAid noted that China's genocide and crimes against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Turks in the Xinjiang area were the subject of two sessions of a tribunal in 2021. It said that while it is impossible for the Tribunal to "convict" China of international crimes, its findings may be used by other countries to censure China's behavior and shape their policies toward the country.
One witness, Gulzira Auelhan revealed her story of torture, sexual assault, and sterilization during the tribunal's most recent session. During their stay in Chinese "re-education" camps, several eyewitnesses likewise reported similar experiences. October's citizen journalist videotape of Uyghur internment camps also added to the mounting evidences.
In response, the Chinese government referred to the tribunal as a "kangaroo court" and referred to the witnesses as actors.
On October 8, hundreds of survivors of China's concentration camps have reportedly spoken out about the horrors they saw. In addition to these survivors, witnesses included journalists and other specialists.
Geoffrey Cain, an American journalist who visited Xinjiang and conducted several interviews, described a setting that may have been plucked from a science-fiction novel. According to him, it was like "stepping into the past" in North Korea, but "stepping into the future" in China's Xinjiang region.
He said that there are a variety of methods used by the Chinese state to gain information on its citizens - including the traditional deployment of spies, interrogations, and psychological pressure. This includes a number of things that may be tracked, such as shopping habits, online browsing, downloaded applications, police and court records, job data, physical traits and photos from street cameras. This massive amount of data is sent straight to local authorities, who use it to select, among other things, who should be sent to the camps.
Technology generated by the Chinese high-tech sector aids the dictatorship, but is employed in its service. According to Conor Healy, an American researcher, the Chinese tech corporation Huawei was involved in designing the "Uyghur alarm," which monitors and classifies the faces of pedestrians based on their ethnicity. As far back as three years ago, the business was looking at getting the invention protected by a patent. Alibaba's cloud service and Tiandy Technologies, the surveillance company, are also said to be involved in ethnic identification.
But what's more alarming is Radio Free Asia's report that Uyghur laborers from Xinjiang are being relocated to other areas of China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The report says that over 3,000 Uyghur employees, including girls as young as 16, were sent to factories in other regions of China this year, and thousands more are expected to be sent in early 2022 by a Chinese job-placement organization.
RFA's Uyghur Service reportedly began investigating after seeing WeChat and Weibo posts claiming that around 2,000 Uyghurs aged 16 to 30 with strong Mandarin Chinese abilities and vocational school degrees were available for two years of labor at different locations throughout China.
The said ad only provided a phone number for executives in need of labor to contact in order to get in touch with the advertiser.
"About 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have cycled through the camp system since 2017. The detainees are held against their will and endure inhumane treatment and political indoctrination," notes the report.
China's image has taken a beating in the previous month as criticism grows. Lebron James, Michael Jordan, and Nike have been criticized for their silence on the forced labor of Uyghurs on Twitter by Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter. Also according to Sheffield Hallam University, forced labor from China's fractious region of Xinjiang has been linked to dozens of major businesses.
