{"id":23746,"date":"2019-12-04T22:26:34","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T22:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jww.org\/?p=23746"},"modified":"2019-12-04T22:26:34","modified_gmt":"2019-12-04T22:26:34","slug":"uyghur-act-passes-house-senate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jww.org\/site\/uyghur-act-passes-house-senate\/","title":{"rendered":"Bipartisan passage of Uyghur Act critical step to demand accountability from China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late on Tuesday evening, December 3, the House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act in a <\/span>landslide vote<\/span><\/a> of 407 to 1, with 23 not voting.  Added to a similar bill that passed the Senate unanimously in September, this amounts to a momentous victory for the persecuted Uyghur population of East Turkestan (the name preferred by the Uyghurs for the region commonly known as Xinjiang, China). This <\/span>version of the bill<\/span><\/a> would force President Trump to condemn abuses against the millions of Uyghurs in China, impose sanctions against Chinese leadership responsible for the mass detention camps and enact export controls on technology that could be used in China\u2019s omnipresent surveillance operation. <\/span><\/p>\n

It is also a victory for the Uyghur diaspora here in the United States, a small group that has worked tirelessly to mobilize their own community and others to ensure this legislation\u2019s passage.  Jewish World Watch has partnered consistently with members of the local Uyghur community to raise awareness of the desperate plight inside China of their friends and family and to encourage members of Congress to endorse this game-changing legislation.  The real-life stories of missing relatives and heartfelt activism of our Uyghur brothers and sisters has educated and touched the hearts of many elected officials, inspiring numerous members of Congress to immediately pledge their support. We stand in solidarity and celebration with them in the wake of this important vote.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Senate version of this bill, introduced by Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ), <\/span>unanimously passed<\/span><\/a> the Senate on September 11, 2019.  The House bill passed Tuesday is more far-reaching than the Senate version, as it promises to enact export controls to prevent U.S. technology from being used to bolster the Chinese government\u2019s Orwellian surveillance capabilities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The House and Senate versions must now be reconciled.  It will then be up to President Trump to sign this extraordinarily bipartisan bill and thereby condemn Beijing\u2019s human rights abuses.  Senator Menendez called Tuesday\u2019s vote \u201crecognition that the U.S. government cannot afford to stand idly by as millions of Uyghur Muslims continue to be unjustly imprisoned, subjected to a mass surveillance state, and forced into labor camps by an autocratic regime.\u201d  Do not stand idly by is Jewish World Watch\u2019s mandate and rallying cry, a promise by our community to speak out and to take action in the face of any mass atrocity plaguing the world. We applaud both chambers of Congress for embracing this call to action and taking proactive steps to stop the unconscionable abuses and hold the architects of these atrocities accountable.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Uyghur human rights movement reached a tipping point last month, when two separate leaks of hundreds of pages of official Chinese government documents corroborated what activists, rights groups and journalists have been alleging for years \u2013 that Beijing is perpetrating a systematic and widespread cultural genocide against the Uyghurs, which likely rises to the level of crimes against humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first set of documents, first published by the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/a> on November 16 and now known as the Xinjiang Papers, revealed the underpinnings of the Chinese government\u2019s crackdown on the Uyghurs in over 400 pages.  Just days later, on November 24, the <\/span>International Consortium of Investigative Journalists<\/span><\/a> (ICIJ) published the China Cables–highly classified Chinese government documents revealing the operations manual for running the mass detention camps in East Turkestan and exposing the mechanics of the region\u2019s Orwellian system of mass surveillance.  According to the Associated Press, the Consortium verified the trove of documents by examining contemporaneous state media reports and public notices, consulting experts, cross-checking signatures and confirming the contents with former camp employees and detainees.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Times and ICIJ\u2019s expos\u00e9s offered a terrifying window into the crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in East Turkestan and quickly prompted new cries for accountability.  The classified documents confirm what Jewish World Watch and our partners have feared for too long, that engineered cultural genocide is undeniably underway and that the systematic and widespread nature of Beijing\u2019s rights-effacing policies rises to the level of mass atrocity crimes.  The documents lay bare the Chinese government\u2019s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities as a preventative measure \u2013 even before a crime is committed \u2013 to rewire their thoughts through forced ideological and behavioral re-education facilities run in secret. The papers also demonstrate how Beijing is pioneering a terrifying new form of social control drawn on data collected by mass-surveillance technology.  In total, the documents reveal a vast system that uses the \u201corgans of dictatorship\u201d to target, surveil, and grade an entire ethnic group in order to forcibly assimilate and control its members. In the words of Xi Jinping, the documents instruct Chinese officials to \u201cshow no mercy\u201d in wiping the human slate clean of the Uyghur culture and, potentially, the Uyghur people altogether.<\/span><\/p>\n

The leaks reveal explicit details on the inner-workings of the concentration camps Beijing claims are voluntary vocational centers intended to benefit and enrich the lives of the Uyghurs:<\/span><\/p>\n