A prominent human rights watchdog urged on Friday the Chinese government to tell the truth about the so-called re-education camps for people accused of extremism amid growing international concern over arbitrary detentions of the country's Uyghur Muslim minority.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd November, 2018) A prominent human rights watchdog urged on Friday the Chinese government to tell the truth about the so-called re-education camps for people accused of extremism amid growing international concern over arbitrary detentions of the country's Uyghur Muslim minority.
The UN Human Rights Council is set to review on Tuesday the situation with the human rights support and protection in China.
"The Chinese government must tell the truth over the mass internment of up to one million predominately Muslim people in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) when the country's human rights record comes under review at the UN Human Rights Council next Tuesday," Amnesty International said in a statement.
In October, China admitted existence of the so-called "vocational education centers" in the XUAR.
"The Human Rights Council must send an unequivocal message to the Chinese government that their campaign of systematic repression in the XUAR, including the arbitrary detention of up to one million people, must end ... The Chinese authorities' recent propaganda should fool no one. The internment camps are places where torture and other forms of ill-treatment is rife," Amnesty International's China Researcher Patrick Poon said as quoted in the statement.
In late August, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said that up to one million ethnic Uyghurs could be kept in correction camps in Xinjiang. According to Amnesty International, the detentions have intensified since the counterextremism law was enacted in 2017, with people facing persecution for displaying their religious and cultural affiliation, using messengers with encryption or traveling abroad to get education.
Uyghurs, China's Muslim minority living predominantly in the country's northwest, reportedly face mass detentions, identity checks and biometric data collection under the pretext of police fighting terrorism due to their ethnic history of independence movements and resistance.
China has refuted that it discriminates against Uyghurs and claimed that the country fully complies with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
