Human rights experts investigating treatment of China’s Uyghur minority heard shocking accounts of torture

“They tortured me all the time”a victim told lawyers and human rights experts in London on Friday that investigate thl treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China, in a process that Beijing has called a “lying machine”.

For four days, the nine members of the “Uyghur court”, so called despite the fact that it has no judicial authority, will First-hand accounts of alleged crimes in China’s Xinjiang region: forced sterilizations, torture, kidnapping and forced labor.

The organizers intend determine whether Beijing is guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other minorities.

Its vice president, Nick Vetch, has promised that his post will be “”impartial“, Based on the testimonies and on”thousands of pages“documents. It will be based” on evidence, nothing more than evidence, “he told the agency. AFP.

Asked to provide evidence in its defense, Beijing did not respond. “It’s not even a real tribunal or a special tribunal, just a lying machineChinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

In the first testimony, Qelbinur Sidik, a former teacher of Uzbek origin in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, said authorities ordered her to teach Chinese in two dirty and overcrowded “re-education” camps for Uyghurs, one man and one woman. .

The “pupils” wore irons during school hours, he told the court. “The police, the camp guards, did not consider the male prisoners as human beings”, he assured, and said: “They liked to see how they were humiliated.”

The women, meanwhile, suffered abuse during interrogation: “They not only tortured them, but also raped them, sometimes in groups”, he claimed. Forced sterilization of Uyghur women was common and in one case a prisoner diedadded.

Sidik claimed to have also been forcibly sterilized before obtaining a visa to visit her daughter in the Netherlands and thus flee China. “The things that I have witnessed and experienced, I cannot forget them even one day”, he assured.

Punishments

Omir Bekali, a Kazakh of Uyghur descent, said he was arrested when he he was visiting his family in Xinjiang.

“During the first four days and nights, they tortured me non-stop,” he said, “They hung me from the ceiling” and “hit me on the body and the soles of my feet.” His father was murdered, his brother, described as a “terrorist” like his sister, was disabled after the torture sessions, he said.

Foreign experts claim that over a million Uyghurs, the main ethnic group in Xinjiang, are detained in camps, subjected to “forced labor”. Beijing denies this and claims that these are vocational training centers aimed at keeping them away from terrorism and separatism after the attacks attributed to the Uyghurs.

The “Uyghur court” report is due in December. Although it has no legal force, the participants hope to attract international attention and lead to possible actions.

“It will correspond to States, international institutions, companies, institutions in the field of art, medicine, education and individuals determine how to apply the sentence, regardless of the», Declared the organizers.

This initiative was created at the request of Uyghur World Congress, the largest representative of the Uyghur community in exile, who urges the international community to act against China.

The “Uyghur court” is one of the entities sanctioned by the Beijing regime for having denounced its treatment of Uyghurs, as well as its president, the British lawyer Geoffrey Nice, who led the prosecutions against the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes before the United Nations justice.

US Says China Committing “Genocide” in Xinjiang, a term the UK has refused to adopt, although it joined Washington and Berlin last month to call for an end to the crackdown on the Uyghur minority.

The hearings started a week before the G7 summit in the South West of England, in which the President of the United States will participate, Joe biden, who called on Western democracies to take a tougher line against China.

Por Callum Paton (AFP)

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