Crime and No Punishment? China’s Abuses Against the Uyghurs

The nominally autonomous region of Xinjiang, located in northwestern China, is home to about 11 million Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic ethnic group making up about 45 percent of the region’s population. In recent years, the Chinese government has escalated its repression of Uyghurs, alleging that these communities hold extremist and separatist views. Since 2017, numerous reports have emerged, stating that more than one million Uyghurs, as well as members from other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang, have been forcibly transferred to “re-education camps” and subjected to arbitrary detention, forced birth control and sterilization, religious restrictions, sexual abuse, torture, family separation, and forced labor, among other abuses.²

Stating that the Uyghur issue is an “internal matter,” China has consistently denied such allegations as those above and has not provided access to representatives of the United Nations (UN) to conduct an independent evaluation of the situation.³ In the absence of official UN reports, independent media outlets and international non-governmental organizations have relied on testimonies, satellite images, and leaked official Chinese government documents to raise global awareness of these ongoing crimes. By reviewing these available reports in light of the applicable international legal standards, this paper argues that, because of their widespread and systematic nature, at least five counts of crimes against humanity—persecution, imprisonment, torture, enslavement, and forced sterilization— are being committed against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. This paper also argues that the state’s measures to sterilize Uyghur women and reduce Uyghur birth rates signify an intent to destroy the group, therefore constituting at least one count of genocide—measures intended to prevent births. International accountability pathways are very limited, and the fear of economic and political reprisal from China, due to its transnational power, is the key deterrent to a stronger response from the international community, one that is urgently needed to prevent a further escalation of these atrocities.

Crimes against humanity

Developed since its first legal expression in 1945, the concept of crimes against humanity has been used in various international instruments and national laws, and its scope has gradually broadened.⁴ The most recent definition is contained in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in 1998 and in force since 2002. According to Article 7 of the statute, eleven acts constitute crimes against humanity, including persecution; imprisonment; torture; enslavement; rape, enforced sterilization, and other forms of sexual violence; and other similar inhumane acts.⁵ While China is not a party to the Rome Statute, the prohibition of crimes against humanity is a peremptory norm of general international law.⁶ This means that it is binding upon all states.⁷

The contextual element of this crime, which must be met in every case irrespective of which specific act(s) is committed, is that these acts must be part of a widespread (large-scale) or systematic (organized) attack. It is disjunctive, meaning that the acts do not have to be both widespread and systematic but simply one or the other.⁸ It does not have to be a military attack: it could be a campaign or an operation, but it does need to be a “course of conduct” as a series or overall flow of events, as opposed to a mere aggregate of unrelated, random or isolated acts.⁹ The attack must be directed against a civilian population as its primary target and not just an incidental victim.¹⁰ The Rome Statute adds the element, not required in the customary law definition, that the attack be committed “pursuant to or in furtherance of a state or organizational policy to commit such an attack,”¹¹ a policy that does not need to be formally adopted but may be inferred.¹²

The repression against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims is both widespread and systematic. Its widespread nature can be seen in the large number of victims and targets involved: over one million Uyghurs detained since 2017 in nearly four hundred “re-education” or “counter-extremism” camps; an estimated eighty thousand Uyghurs forcibly transferred to factories for...