Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

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The Uyghur Tribunal – a non-governmental independent collective of legal experts, businesspeople, health experts, and academicians based in London – said Thursday that the Peoples Republic of China is guilty of genocide. 

The ruling, which carries no official diplomatic or governmental weight, was handed down after the group spent most of 2020 and 2021 investigating China’s treatment of its Uyghur, Kazakh and other ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang. 

“No legal or other specialist knowledge is required to understand the Judgment,” reads the statement of judgement, which was offered by Sir Geoffrey Nice, a British attorney who founded the tribunal in 2020. “The allegations are of the gravest human rights violations and international crimes.”

The tribunal condemned China in seven areas: detaining ethnic minorities without cause, torturing detainees, immobilizing detainees for months with shackles, allowing detained men and women to be raped, depriving detainees of food, mutilating the genitalia of women detainees, and subjecting detainees to solitary confinement in poorly lit and tight spaces. 

While the group found numerous accounts of people dying from the treatment they received while detained, the tribunal found no evidence of mass killings. 

“The Tribunal Members, working with no preconceptions, have assessed evidence to decide whether the PRC, a great, powerful and successful nation, has been and is attacking with the intent of destroying a part, or parts, of its own population,” the ruling reads.

The response from China was equal parts indignant and boisterous. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the tribunal of having been concocted at the pressing of the World Uyghur Congress. 

“[The World Uyghur Congress] hired liars to make false statements and falsify evidence, in an attempt to craft a political tool to disrupt Xinjiang and smear China,” Wang said in a statement. “This so-called ‘tribunal’ is completely void of any legal basis and has no credibility at all. The malicious intention of its previous anti-China activities have been laid bare by facts and deplored by perceptive people in the international community. The so-called final ruling by such a machine churning out lies is nothing but a political farce staged by a handful of contemptible individuals.”

Despite its incendiary nature, there is an element of truth to Wang’s claim. According to the tribunal’s website, the Uyghur Tribunal was created at the request of World Uyghur Congress President Dolkun Isa. However, Nice and his colleagues said they strove to be just and fair in their investigation. 

“The Tribunal has borne in mind that the allegations themselves and much of the evidence provided by witnesses came from people predisposed against the PRC, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or communism itself,” the ruling reads. “And it would be errant to conceive of the Tribunal’s work as the examination of a bad state to see quite how bad it is … Not at all.”

“The PRC and the CCP is an enormous government machine running a vast country with the needs of the world’s largest national population to be met. Its own values may be respected save where its actions are contrary to international norms or in breach of international law.”

Among the goals of the tribunal is to awaken disgust, if not action, in the West. 

“Any single witness statement would, in nearly all cases and if accepted as true, contain accounts of mental and physical cruelty and suffering as to cause sustained outrage in nations that count themselves as free,” the ruling reads. 

China’s position is that the tribunal’s efforts will go for naught and are unlikely to garner any reaction in Europe or the U.S. 

“Lies remain lies, no matter how many times they are repeated,” Wang said. “For all the director’s and actors’ efforts in plotting and maneuvering, the farce has attracted a very small audience and received little echo. More and more people begin to know about China. Lies cannot cover up facts and truth, cheat the international community, still less stop the historical trend of stability, development and prosperity in China’s Xinjiang. This farce is doomed to be rejected by all and end up in the dustbin in history.”

The tribunal says through its official website that its primary goal was to create a permanent record of China’s actions.