China retroactively legalizes internment camps where up to 1 million Muslim citizens are detained

China has retroactively legitimized internment camps in the far northwest of Xinjiang, reinforcing the accusations of systematic violations of their rights, torture and mass detention of one million people. Uighurs, a minority Muslim group.

It seems to be the last response of the Chinese government to the increasingly international criticism of the state's treatment of the Uyghurs. Last month, Li Xiaojun, China's director of advertising at the Bureau of Human Rights, claimed that the alleged internment camps where Uighurs are detained are actually "vocational training centers". – education centers, "according to Reuters.

Following allegations that these centers would have no legal basis, the Chinese authorities retroactively revised the legislation to allow them. The amendment, revealed on Tuesday, indicates that government agencies are allowed to establish "education and training centers" in order to effectively hold "people influenced by extremism" for an indefinite period, according to the same source The Guardian.

The Chinese Communist Party is suspicious that Xinjiang, which is home to more than 10 million people of mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic origin, is a hub for potentially separatist activities. But state control has tightened considerably since the beginning of 2017, with a growing number of checkpoints, police patrols and armored vehicles.

This radical change coincided with the appointment of Chen Quanguo as the Xinjiang party secretary, an authoritarian figure who implemented a similar set of policies during his previous post in Tibet.

In August, the United Nations confronted China about this information. Gay McDougall, an American lawyer and member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, accused China of turning Xinjiang into "a camp resembling a gigantic internment camp, in secrecy, a sort of "no-rights zone", where Muslims were "treated as enemies of the state solely on the basis of their ethno-religious identity," according to the report The New York Times.

China's decision to retroactively revise its own law is part of this growing criticism, but it will do little to repress it. "This is a retrospective justification for the mass detention of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang," said James Leibold, an ethnic politics scholar at Melbourne's La Trobe University. The Guardian. "This is a new form of unprecedented rehabilitation that has no real legal basis, and I see them struggling to try to create a legal basis for this policy."

In his official statements, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that he was not doing anything wrong. Last year, Ailiti Saliyev, deputy director of foreign advertising in Xinjiang, went so far as to describe the region's Muslims as "the happiest Muslims in the world" and attacked "hostile Western forces" that "spread rumors, "reports Reuters.