A UN human rights committee has heard there are credible reports that China is holding a million Uighurs in “counter-extremism centres”.
Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, raised the claims at a two-day UN meeting on China.
She said she was concerned by reports that Beijing had “turned the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internment camp”.
China did not immediately respond.
Its 50-strong delegation said it would address questions on Monday, when the session in Geneva continues.
The Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority mostly based in China’s Xinjiang province. They make up around 45% of the population there.
Xinjiang is officially designated as an autonomous region within China, like Tibet to its south.
Reports that more and more Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are being detained in Xinjiang have been circulating for some months.
Human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have submitted reports to the UN committee documenting claims of mass imprisonment, in camps where inmates are forced to swear loyalty to China’s President Xi Jinping.
The World Uyghur Congress said in its report that detainees are held indefinitely without charge, and forced to shout Communist Party slogans.
It said they are poorly fed, and reports of torture are widespread. Most inmates have never been charged with a crime, it is claimed, and do not receive legal representation.
China is said to carry out the detentions under the guise of combating religious extremism. The Chinese government denies the existence of these camps.
In April, Laura Stone, a senior diplomat in the US State Department, said tens of thousands of people had been detained in “re-education centres” amid a government crackdown.
In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying stated that, “everyone can see that people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang live and work in peace and contentment and enjoy peaceful and progressing lives”.
The claims come on a day of worsening religious tensions elsewhere in China.
In the north-western Ningxia region, hundreds of Muslims engaged in a standoff with authorities on Friday to prevent their mosque from being demolished.
Officials said the newly-built Weizhou Grand Mosque had not been given proper building permits. However, human rights groups say there is increasing official hostility towards Muslims in China, where religious activities remain tightly controlled by the government.
They are the detainees whose very existence China denies, as many as a million Uighur and other Muslim people who human rights activists say are being held in a vast web of detention camps in western China.
A United Nations committee in Geneva examining China’s record on racial discrimination rebuffed Beijing’s denials of the reeducation camps and called on it to acknowledge the existence of the facilities and release those who are being detained. In a report released Thursday, the committee dismissed China’s justifications that it faced a terrorist problem in the Xinjiang region as nothing more than “a pretext” for detaining the minority Muslims.
A bipartisan group of 17 U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, urged the Trump administration to sanction Chinese officials and companies allegedly involved in the detention centers.
During hearings on China’s human rights record by the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Gay McDougall, an American human rights attorney and committee vice chairwoman, cited credible reports that more than 1 million Muslim people had been detained and said Xinjiang had been turned “into something that resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”
The U.N. committee report expressed alarm over “numerous reports of detention of large numbers of ethnic Uighurs and other minority Muslims held incommunicado and often for long periods, without being charged or tried, under the pretext of countering terrorism and religious extremism.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying rejected the accusations, saying they had “no factual basis.”
“As for certain counterterrorism and stability maintenance preventive measures, I think that internationally this is in general use by lots of countries,” she added.
