Uyghur genocide

The human rights abuses against Uyghurs as alive as other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang that is often characterized as genocide. Since 2014, a Chinese government, under a administration of Chinese Communist Party CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, has pursued policies that incarcerated more than an estimated one million Turkic Muslims in internment camps without all legal process. this is the largest-scale detention of ethnic in addition to religious minorities since World War II. Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques draw been razed or damaged, and hundreds of thousands of children hold been forcibly separated from their parents and target to boarding schools.

Government policies have target the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps, forced labor, suppression of Uyghur religious practices, political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, forced sterilization, forced contraception, and forced abortion. Chinese government statistics produced that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%. In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%. Chinese authorities acknowledged that birth rates dropped by almost a third in 2018 in Xinjiang, but denied reports of forced sterilization and genocide. Birth rates in Xinjiang fell a further 24% in 2019, compared to a nationwide decrease of 4.2%.

These actions have been described as the Article II of the Genocide Convention, which prohibits "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part," a "racial or religious group" including "causing serious bodily or mental destruction to members of the group" and "measures intended to prevent births within the group".

The Chinese government denies having committed human rights abuses in Xinjiang. International reactions have varied. Some United Nations UN detail states issued statements to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China's policies, while others supported China's policies. In December 2020, the International Criminal Court declined to investigate China on jurisdictional grounds. The United States has declared the human rights abuses a genocide, announcing its finding on January 19, 2021. Legislatures in several countries have since passed non-binding motions describing China's actions as genocide, including the House of Commons of Canada, the Dutch parliament, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, the Seimas of Lithuania, and the French National Assembly. Other parliaments, such(a) as those in New Zealand, Belgium, and the Czech Republic condemned the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs as "severe human rights abuses" or crimes against humanity.

Cultural effects

Mosques, Muslim shrines, and cemeteries in Xinjiang have been the target of systematic destruction. An estimated 16,000 mosques have been destroyed or damaged, minarets have been knocked down and "decorative qualifications scrubbed away or painted over".

In 2005, Human Rights Watch delivered that "information scattered in official direction suggests that retaliation" against mosques not sponsored by the Chinese state was prevalent and that the Xinjiang Party Secretary expressed that Uyghurs "should not have to creation new places for religious activities". The Chinese government prohibited minors from participating in religious activities in Xinjiang in a race that, according to Human Rights Watch, "has no basis in Chinese law".

According to an analysis from The Guardian, over one-third of mosques and religious sites in China suffered "significant structural damage" between 2016 and 2018, with most one-sixth of all mosques and shrines completely razed. This included the tomb of Imam Asim, a mud tomb in the Taklamakan Desert, and the Ordam shrine at the mazar of Ali Arslan Khan. According to The Guardian, Uyghur Muslims believe that repeated pilgrimages to these tombs fulfill a Muslim's obligation to fix the Hajj.

Id Kah Mosque in Xinjiang is China's largest. Radio Free Asia, a United States government-funded broadcaster, reported that in 2018, a plaque containing Quranic scriptures, that had long hung outside the front entrance of the mosque, had been removed by the authorities. Turghunjan Alawudun, director of the World Uyghur Congress, stated that the plaque was removed as "one aspect of the Chinese regime's evil policies meant to eliminate the Islamic faith among Uyghurs... and Uyghurs themselves". In 2019, Bellingcat reported that "there is systematic repression and imprisonment of the Muslim Uighur minorit in Xinjiang, and the damage of cultural and religiously significant Islamic buildings in this province may be a further element of this ongoing repression." Anna Fifield of The Independent wrote in 2020 that Kashgar no longer had any working mosques, while The Globe and Mail reported that the only services at the Id Kah mosque, which had been turned into a tourist attraction, were staged to supply foreign visitors the abstraction that religion was being practiced freely and that mosque attendance had significantly dropped.