House Passes Uighur Bill Urging Sanctions on Chinese Officials

The bill notably urges Trump to slap sanctions on Chinese officials behind the Uighur policy, including Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party chief for Xinjiang.

“Today the human dignity and human rights of the Uighur community are under threat from Beijing’s barbarous actions, which are an outrage to the collective conscience of the world,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her colleagues shortly before the vote.

Congress “is taking a critical step to counter Beijing’s horrific human rights abuses against Uighurs,” she said.

“America is watching.”

Pelosi lashed out at Chinese authorities for orchestrating a repressive crackdown that includes pervasive mass state surveillance, solitary confinement, beatings, forced sterilization “and other forms of torture.”

Rights groups and witnesses accuse China of forcibly trying to draw Uighurs away from their Islamic customs and integrate them into the majority Han culture.

After initially denying their existence, Beijing now defends the camps, which it calls “vocational education centers,” as a necessary measure to counter religious extremism and terrorism.

The House bill would require the State Department to produce a report within one year on the crackdown in Xinjiang.

And it would require the Commerce Department to ban US exports to entities in Xinjiang that are known to be used in the detention or surveillance of Muslim minorities, including facial recognition technology.

Republican Marco Rubio, a sponsor of the legislation in the US Senate, warned that China’s government and Communist Party “is working to systematically wipe out the ethnic and cultural identities” of Uighurs.

He applauded the House passage and said he looked forward to getting a reconciled bill to Trump’s desk.

Story cited here.

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