The Uyghur Tribunal one year on: Has anything changed?
One year has passed since a panel of ordinary citizens in the U.K. declared a genocide to be unfolding in the Uyghur homeland, but much of the world still has to act on its implications.
The Uyghur Tribunal was launched in September 2020, by Geoffrey Nice, the prosecutor in the war crimes trial of Slobodan Miloลกeviฤ. He was responding to global concern about Chinaโs treatment of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China, and specifically to a request from the World Uyghur Congress, a Munich-based group that has lobbied for Uyghur causes since 2004.
More than a dozen experts and a handful of witnesses joined the Tribunal to present evidence, including former detainees of internment camps in Xinjiang, and the scholars Jo Smith Finley, Adrian Zenz, historian James Millward, and anthropologist Darren Byler (disclosure: a contributor to The China Project). The eighteen months of deliberations, hundreds of thousands of documents, ten thousand hours of background research and scrutiny of 500 witness statements, produced the world’s largest cache of evidence concerning the atrocities taking place in Xinjiang.
On December 9, 2021, the Tribunal issued a judgment that found that โhundreds of thousands of Uyghurs โ with some estimates well in excess of a million โ have been detained by PRC authorities without any, or any remotely sufficient reason, and subjected to acts of unconscionable cruelty, depravity and inhumanity.โ
Uyghurs were heartened at the time, and some groups designated December 9 as Uyghur Genocide Recognition Day in recognition of the Tribunalโs findings. But more than a year on, they are dismayed by the lackluster response from the international community. Policy makers continue to bow to profits, dragging their feet over punitive legislation, and fearful of the superpower government that is the perpetrator of these crimes.
The definition of genocide
The Tribunal concluded that Chinaโs treatment of Uyghurs meets the conditions of genocide under the United Nations Genocide Convention that came into force in 1951. This conclusion followed a U.S. verdict on genocide in January 2021, and a legal determination by the U.K.’s Essex Court Chambers in February 2021. The parliaments of eight countries, including that of Taiwan this year, are on board with the genocide definition, several still without the blessing of their governments. (The U.K.โs government is adamant that only a world court can adjudicate the crime, whilst well aware at the same time that China’s veto would scupper international adjudication.)
Not a single Muslim country has stood up to China for which oversight they should be “named and shamed,” according to Hamid Sabi, legal counsel for the Uyghur Tribunal proceedings.
Following the much-delayed but damning UN commissioned report on Xinjiang last year, attempts to bring China to account were outvoted 19 to 17 at the UN Human Rights Council, and some are still quibbling on the right definition for the horrors. When the Economist called “genocide” the wrong word to describe the atrocities, Uyghur researcher Nyrola Elimรค retorted “while the world debates a word, we are dying.”
No change in China
Despite Western saber rattling and hand wringing, Beijing appears to be plowing on regardless with its plan to transform Xinjiang into little more than an open air penal colony, where citizens are intrusively and extensively surveilled, and subject to forced labor on an industrial scale. Adrian Zenz, the German academic whose research has underpinned much of the case for genocide, said at the International Uyghur Forum in November 2022 that 500,000 ethnic minority Chinese citizens have been compelled to work after their detention. With increased quotas since 2021, between two and two and a half million are at significant risk of forced labor through poverty alleviation programs or labor transfer. Almost 10% of global forced labor emanates from Xinjiang, he claimed.
Activists hoped that in the light of the serious accusations against China, trade with the superpower might peter off and the world might look elsewhere for cheap labor. But the legal challenges in governments have been piecemeal and often thwarted over definitions and small print.
Casting disdain over the Tribunal and its conclusions, Beijing continues to boast a year on year “unstoppable miracle,” with its “roaring export machine” and “world-leading growth momentum” and an economy it claims has surpassed the west during the three year pandemic. Despite sanctions and cotton embargoes imposed by the West, Xinjiang still produces over 90% of China’s cotton and according to the China News Service, production is up 5.5% over last year.
The stain of genocide has done little to taint trade or significant partnerships. Business with the U.S. actually hit record levels by the end of 2022 and with the EU still in the healthy billions. A recent U.K. Times report describes how “China has quietly spent ยฃ134 billion [$166.3 billion] hoovering up British assets, from nuclear power to private schools and pizza chains” and that almost 200 companies “are either controlled by Chinese investors or count them as minority shareholders.”
The Chinese surveillance technology companies Hikvision and Dahua which have been documented to be complicit in the persecution of Uyghurs and Kazakhs have been undeterred by recent legislation to blacklist them in the U.S. Despite other countries also looking at sanctions, the two companies are doggedly researching innovations in people tracking and racial profiling, and in the U.K, their cameras line public buildings, hospitals, schools and even children’s toilets.
Jewish World Watch has compiled a list of 700 companies with headquarters around the world, such as Adidas, H&M, Airbus, Nike, Volkswagen and Apple, that are complicit in Uyghur forced labor. But their trade continues to be brisk.
The U.S.’s much vaunted Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act (UFLPA), with its own entity list, whereby all imports are assumed guilty of forced labor unless they can prove innocence, has been a step in the right direction, but already compliance challenges are afoot, with many companies slipping through the net.
The EU’s projected forced labor legislation risks being not fit for purpose, with no requirement for all member states to be on the same page and the U.K. continues to sit on the fence by putting the onus on businesses themselves to investigate problems. Piecemeal sanctions on Chinese officials by the U.K., the U.S. and the EU have made but a minor dent in the overall picture while hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs still languish, disappear or be illegally incarcerated.
One hundred and fifty nations are signatories to the Genocide Convention, legally and honour bound to act when there is a risk of genocide anywhere, but despite various failed attempts to appeal to the ICC, and a case pending over cotton slavery in the UK, most are failing to raise as much as a murmur on behalf of the Uyghurs in the highest courts of the world.
Siobhรกn Allen, legal officer for Global Legal Action Network, whose organization is involved in legal action off the back of the Tribunal, described its work as having made a “concrete impact on further legal processes and legal examinations of the human rights abuses we are seeing in East Turkestan.” But she considered a joint international push to “hurt the pockets” of its beneficiaries as the only way forward.
Omer Kanat, director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, quoting the 2007 International Court of Justice ruling over Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro whereby signatories have a duty to step in “at the instant” a state learns of a serious risk of genocide, says that time is running out for his people for whom “nothing has changed on the ground.”
“They continue to suffer,” he says. He urges NGO’s, think tanks, and key civil society partners to continue pressing governments and international courts to hold China accountable for the atrocities it continues to carry out in his homeland. “Nothing can bring back what has already been lost, but we can mitigate some of the suffering and act so that the perpetrators are held to account.”
