In the last week, the extent of the oppression faced by the Uyghur people has reached the public conscience. If there were any doubts remaining regarding the treatment by the Chinese Communist Party of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, they have been permanently erased by reports of forced sterilisation and birth control imposed on tens of thousands of Uyghur women.
This is in addition to evidence of detention camps to treat the so-called pathology of religion, forced organ harvesting, rape, children ripped from their families, torture and DNA databases, that have also been uncovered in Xinjiang Province, all in a Chinese Communist Party effort to eradicate a religious minority.
All these claims have been confirmed by official Chinese government documents that have been leaked to a free media.
Out of the horrors of the Second World War, our societies swore that such cruelty should never happen again. Too many times, we have failed in that effort, as we did 25 years ago in Rwanda when the international community failed to act following mass murder. We will not make the same mistake again, and as representatives elected by our people and sworn to uphold human rights at home and abroad, we will take a stand against those who systematically and in an industrialised manner seek to eradicate ethnic and religious minorities.
For that reason, we the undersigned urge our Governments to uphold their international legal and moral obligations and use their best endeavours to, through bilateral and multilateral engagement, end the violations of human dignity and international law occurring in Xinjiang Province.
In doing so, we present the following five requests to our Governments:
- To impose sanctions on officials of the Chinese State and Chinese Communist Party who have perpetrated or profited from orders given to eradicate, torture or otherwise persecute the Uyghur people.
- To work together to request that a UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights Situation in Xinjiang be appointed by the UN Human Rights Council.
- To request that humanitarian organisations once again have access to Xinjiang, and that organisations such as the Red Crescent be allowed to operate freely and without restriction in the region.
- To request that the Chinese state lift its ban on international observers and organisations, most especially journalists in Xinjiang, so that the human rights situation and experiences of the Uyghur People might be documented and understood.
- To request that the Chinese state cease, in all respects, what is clearly a cultural genocide against the Uyghur people.
The international community has failed before to uphold its obligations and to stop appalling crimes against human decency. We the undersigned pledge that no such failure shall occur on our watch, and that the Uyghur people shall not be forgotten.
Signed:
Alicia Kearns MP (UK)
Erin O’Toole MP (Canada)
Mantas Adomenas (Lithuania)
Malik Azmani MEP (Netherlands)
Raphaël Glucksmann MEP (France)
Sandro Gozi MEP (Italy)
Heidi Hautala MEP (Finland)
Frank Heinrich MdB (Germany)
Stewart Malcolm McDonald MP (UK)
Martin Patzelt MdB (Germany)
Tom Tugendhat (UK)
