The Uighur Court, a people’s court created in London last year by English lawyer Geoffrey Nice, concluded on Thursday (9) that China had committed torture, crimes against humanity and genocide against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region . According to the ruling, the evidence presented proves the veracity of the accusations “beyond reasonable doubt”.
The court found that hundreds of thousands of Uighurs (with some estimates putting numbers in excess of 1 million) have been detained by Chinese authorities in recent years. Many of them were subjected to torture such as beatings, “tiger chairs”, where feet and hands were locked in the same position for hours or days at a time, confinement in cold water containers up to their necks and imprisonment in cages so small they made it impossible to stand. or lying down.
The Uighur Court also highlighted frequent rapes of imprisoned women and men – one account pointed out that a young woman in her mid-20s was raped by police officers in front of an audience of 100 people, all forced to watch the violence. According to the court, women detained had their vaginas and rectum penetrated by electric shock rods and iron bars.
Also according to the sentence report, detainees did not receive enough food (often withheld to punish or humiliate the prisoner), were subjected to solitary confinement in permanently dark or lighted cells and deprived of sleep for days at a time, in addition to frequent humiliation.
The Uighur Court pointed out that, in addition to torture, crimes against humanity attributable to China were established “beyond reasonable doubt” due to acts of deportation or forced transfer, imprisonment or other severe deprivations of physical liberty, torture, rape, sexual violence , forced sterilization, persecution and forced disappearance, among others.
Regarding the genocide charges, the court pointed out that there is evidence of acts provided for in the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: executions; cause serious physical and mental harm to members of an ethnic group; deliberately affect the living conditions of an ethnic group; impose conditions to reduce the number of births (which consisted of orchestrating the immigration of people of the Han ethnicity, the majority in China, and the emigration of Uighurs through incarceration, thus making it difficult to perpetuate this ethnicity, in addition to sterilization and forced abortions); and forced transfer of children.
The report noted that there is doubt as to whether the scale and intent of the acts carried out by the Chinese regime could meet the requirements for the use of the term genocide. However, the Uighur Court found that the “unborn” population of the Uighur ethnic group in Xinjiang “constitutes a ‘substantial part’ for the purposes of the Genocide Convention”.
A court-commissioned study estimated “conservatively” that the actions taken by the Chinese regime had reduced the projected population growth of the Uighur ethnic group in Xinjiang from 2.6 million to 4.6 million people, or between 20 and 34% of the Uighurs who would be alive in the region in 2040.
“Consequently, based on the evidence heard publicly, the court concluded beyond any reasonable doubt that the People’s Republic of China, by imposing measures to prevent births with the intention of destroying a significant proportion of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, committed genocide.” The court.
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