A “people’s tribunal” set up to assess whether China’s alleged rights abuses against the Uyghur people constitute genocide has opened in London, with witnesses alleging inmates at detention camps are routinely humiliated, tortured and abused.
Chairman Geoffrey Nice said more than three dozen witnesses would make “grave” allegations against Chinese authorities during four days of hearings.
The tribunal, made up of lawyers, academics and businesspeople, does not have UK government backing or any powers to sanction or punish China.
But organisers hope the process of publicly laying out evidence will compel international action to tackle alleged abuses against the Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group.
Mr Nice, a British barrister who led the prosecution of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and has worked with the International Criminal Court, said the forum would create “a permanent body of evidence and a record, if found, of crimes perpetrated”.
Funded by the World Uyghur Congress and individual donations, the inquiry is modelled on previous “people’s tribunals,” including one organised in the 1960s by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to investigate the Unite States’ actions in the Vietnam War.
The London tribunal is the latest attempt to hold China accountable for alleged rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim and ethnic Turkic minorities.
An estimated 1 million people or more — most of them Uyghurs — have been confined in re-education camps in China’s western Xinjiang region in recent years, according to researchers.
Chinese authorities have been accused of forced labour, systematic forced birth control and torture, and separating children from incarcerated parents.
In April, Britain’s Parliament — though not the British government — followed legislatures in Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada in declaring that Beijing’s policies against the Uyghurs amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity.
The first witness to testify on Friday, teacher Qelbinur Sidik, said guards routinely humiliated inmates at a camp for men in Xinjiang where she taught Mandarin-language classes in 2016.
“Guards in the camp did not treat the prisoners as human beings. They were treated less than dogs,” she said through an interpreter.
