China's justification for "reeducation camps" is merely a "flimsy excuse"

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), the Chinese government's attempts to justify the "re-education camps" for Uyghurs in Xinjiang are merely to be seen as a "flimsy excuse". "The fact that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs are locked up and brainwashed for months or even years, simply because of their ethnicity, is not an internal affair, but a crime against humanity," emphasized Ulrich Delius, the STP's director, in Göttingen on Tuesday. "There is no justification for that."

By using draconian measures like this against the Uyghurs, China is committing serious human rights violations – a breach of international conventions that the People's Republic, as a member of the United Nations, has signed as well.

It is estimated that up to one million of the approximately ten million Uyghurs in northwestern China are interned in so-called re-education camps.

Header image: PENG, Yanan (Neo-Jay) via Wikimedia Commons