Trudeau Urged to Label Uyghur Persecution ‘Genocide’ in the Wake of Recent UK Ruling

Content warning: sexual violence

A non-binding motion was introduced in the Canadian parliament by MPs of the Conservative party calling on PM Justin Trudeau to apply the label ‘genocide’ to the treatment of the Uyghurs by the Chinese government. The move, criticized by China, follows last week’s statements by Trudeau cautioning against using the term loosely. Corroborated by an increasing number of news reports, a recent UK legal opinion instead suggests that referring to ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ is justified in this case.

The motion recently put forward in the Canadian House of Commons does not spell out any legal steps or changes as a result of applying the label. Instead, it simply calls for the recognition of the situation as more serious than previously considered. As a result of such recognition, however, legislators aim to put a number of measures up for discussion, such as “economic sanctions” or “re-location of the next winter Olympics”. The Liberal party “continue to maintain they are ‘carefully’ weighing the decision”. The pending vote on the motion was denounced by the Chinese ambassador in Canada, Cong Peiwu, who said: “We firmly oppose that because it runs counter to the facts. … There’s nothing like genocide happening in Xinjiang at all.”

Update: The motion has passed 266-0, with Trudeau along with his Cabinet abstaining for diplomatic rather than substantive reasons.

Last week, PM Trudeau responded to a question about the Uyghurs by the press. He explained that his hesitation to call the situation a ‘genocide’ is that international law and the international community “rightly” take such a label “very, very seriously”. In his view, a loose usage of the term would “weaken” the seriousness with which we perceive historical instances of genocide. Nevertheless, Trudeau continued to state:

“[The word genocide] is certainly something that we should be looking at in the case of the Uyghurs, … We have been consistent in our concerns and our condemnation of human rights violations around the world, including situations in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang and elsewhere.”

In July 2019, under Trudeau, Canada had co-signed a letter together with 21 other countries “expressing concern about ‘credible reports of arbitrary detention’” of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, as reported by CNN.

In contrast to Trudeau’s approach, US president Joe Biden appeared to have a more resolute policy against criticising the actions of the Chinese government. In a CNN Town Hall last week, Biden said:

“I’m not gonna speak out what [Xi Jinping] is doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uyghurs in western mountains of China, and Taiwan - trying to end the One-China Policy by making it forceful… And he gets it. Culturally, there are different norms in each country that the leaders are expected to follow.”

Biden prefaced this statement by recalling that throughout history, China has always had to be “unified at home” to avoid being “victimized” by the outside world. Rather than being a ‘genocide’, ‘unification’ seems to be Biden’s preferred term for China’s treatment of the Uyghurs.

The debate comes in the wake of increasing attention being brought to the issue of China’s domestic persecution. Recently, the BBC has published detailed accounts from Xinjiang’s refugees, who further corroborated others’ allegations against China in recent years. “According to independent estimates, more than a million men and women have been detained in the sprawling network of camps, which China says exist for the ‘re-education’ of the Uighurs and other minorities,” recounts the BBC. 

In the camps, prisoners “spent hours singing patriotic Chinese songs and watching patriotic TV programmes about Chinese President Xi Jinping”. For inaccurately memorising lengthy passages from books about Xi Jinping, detainees are deprived of food and subject to beatings.

According to a Chinese camp policewoman who had spoken to a Xinjiang refugee, “rape has become a culture [in the camps]. It is gang rape and the Chinese police not only rape them but also electrocute them. They are subject to horrific torture.” The refugee also told the BBC that “there were ‘four kinds of electric shock’, … ‘the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick’”. Further, the Associated Press has reported on a campaign of forced sterilisation in Xinjiang.

Refugees from the camps recount that the aim of the internment process is to break people down. Even though some detainees are eventually released from captivity, those people are “finished”. “The surveillance, the internment, the indoctrination, the dehumanisation, the sterilisation, the torture, the rape” all seem to be designed to “destroy” the individuals who undergo the process so that even for survivors returning to ‘life as usual’ is not possible anymore.

In a statement on January 19th, then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the US had officially found the case of the Uyghurs to constitute genocide and crimes against humanity. Such a strong position has not been reiterated since by the new administration.

Pompeo’s statements were recently corroborated by a legal opinion of the Essex Court Chambers in London. According to the BBC, this lengthy finding is “based on an exhaustive legal assessment over six months of publicly available evidence from governments, international organisations, academic scholars, charities and the media.” Its conclusions are measured against Articles 6 and 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the most widely accepted definitions of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’, respectively.

The opinion finds that “there is sufficient evidence to amount to an arguable case” that “enslavement”, “widescale deprivations of liberty … without charge or trial”, “torture” including “sexual violence”, “rape”, “enforced sterilisation … as part of efforts to reduce the Uyghur population”, “persecution”, and “enforced disappearance” has been taking place in Xinjiang, amounting to “crimes against humanity being committed against the Uyghur population”. 

Additionally, “there is evidence that the crime of genocide is currently being committed” in Xinjiang - “there is an intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” the Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group. Specific acts carried out against people with this intent include “causing serious bodily or mental harm … to Uyghurs in detention, including acts of torture and forced sterilisations”, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” among the Uyghurs, and “forcibly transferring children [of the Uyghurs] to another group [of people].”

For these crimes, the opinion identifies both the Chinese state as a whole as responsible, as well as specific figures bearing individual responsibility - Chinese President Xi Jinping, Deputy Secretary of the Xinjiang People’s Congress Zhu Hailun, and Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo.