Complaint With ICC 'Provides Proof Of Uyghur Genocide', Calls For Investigation Of Chinese Officials

Uyghur exiles urged the International Criminal Court on Monday to investigate Beijing for genocide and crimes against humanity, the first-ever attempt to use international law to hold China’s ruling Communist Party accountable for its "draconian crackdown on the Muslim minority".

A team of London-based lawyers representing two Uyghur activist groups have filed a complaint against Beijing for pursuing the repatriation of thousands of Uyghurs through unlawful arrests in or deportation from Cambodia and Tajikistan.

The case could bring greater international scrutiny of the Chinese state’s power to impose its will beyond its borders, reports the NY Times.

The lawyers’ 80-page filing includes a list of more than 30 Chinese officials they said were responsible for the campaign, including Xi Jinping, the Communist Party leader.

Mr. Xi’s policies over recent years have put Muslim minorities in China’s western region of Xinjiang under a pervasive net of surveillance, detention, and social re-engineering.

Over one million ethnic Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities have been held in internment camps in the region, drawing growing global condemnation. In May of 2018, Randall Schriver of the United States Department of Defense repeatedly said "likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in these camps.

As set out in the Complaint to the ICC, crimes have historically been committed in East Turkistan by Chinese forces since 1884. The bulk of the Complaint focuses on the marked increase in crimes following the Urumqi massacre on 5th-7th July 2009, eleven years ago today.

The crimes committed against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples include:

• massacres;
• mass internment camps;
• torture;
• disappearances;
• forced birth control and sterilization;
• forcible transfer of children from their families to Chinese state orphanages and boarding schools;
• measures aimed at eliminating the use of the Uyghur and other Turkic languages in schools;
• enhanced surveillance of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples significantly beyond that experienced by Han Chinese;
• repressive measures against Islam; and,
• organ harvesting.

The East Turkistan Government in Exile considers East Turkistan (the region known as Xinjiang) to be a colony or occupied territory which as an independent state would be known as East Turkistan as it had been prior to the Chinese Communist occupation in 1949.

The East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) is the official body that represents East Turkistan and its people worldwide. Established on September 14, 2004, in Washington DC, its mission is to end China’s occupation of East Turkistan and to restore its independence as a pluralistic democratic republic, guaranteeing human rights and freedom to all.

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