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Thursday March 28, 2024

Uighurs urge ICC to probe Chinese ‘genocide’

By AFP
July 08, 2020

THE HAGUE: -Exiled Uighurs urged the International Criminal Court on Tuesday to investigate China for genocide and crimes against humanity, filing a huge dossier of evidence with the Hague-based court to back their case.

The evidence handed to the ICC´s prosecutor accuses China of locking more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in re-education camps and of forcibly sterilising women. China has called the forced sterilisation accusations baseless and says the facilities in the northwestern Xinjiang region are job training centres aimed at steering people away from terrorism.

“Today is a very historic day for us.” Salih Hudayar, prime minister of the self-styled East Turkestan government in exile, told a virtual press conference held in Washington and The Hague. China is not an ICC member but lawyers for the Uighurs said the court could follow the example of its ongoing probe into the treatment of Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar, which is also not party to the tribunal.