(Washington, D.C.) – On Monday, House Oversight National Security Subcommittee Ranking Member Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) urged Subcommittee Chairman Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) to hold a hearing examining the atrocities being committed by the Communist Party of China against the country’s Uighur ethnic minority.
“We must determine the extent of the CCP’s suppression of minorities, ensure that the administration is doing everything in its power to respond, and examine whether there is a need for additional legislation,” the letter from Ranking Member Grothman explains. “It is time to shine a bright light on these atrocities and the actions of the CCP.”
Other key excerpts from the letter:
“As a Republic founded on the self-evident truth that men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, our country stands with those who face religious persecution, wherever they are. It is the policy of the United States to condemn violations of religious freedom and to promote religious freedom around the world.”
“We are particularly disturbed by recent evidence – coming from data taken from the CCP’s own documents that the CCP is conducting mass forced sterilizations of women, forced abortions, and utilizing mandatory invasive birth control measures to reduce family size among the Uighur people. Those who resist or violate these forced abortion and birth control policies may be placed in internment camps, which already hold over a million ethnic Uighurs.”
“The CCP was already systematically working to exterminate the presence of Uighur culture and religion, including by incarcerating over a million people, but now they are even trying to eliminate Uighur families and suppress births. This is genocide and it demands immediate action.”
Read the full text of the letter here.
Background:
The Chinese government has been systematically persecuting the Uighur minority for years.
In 2018, a United Nations human rights panel indicated that Xi regime had forced as many as 1 million Uighurs into concentration camps. An Axios report from last year estimated that as many as 2 million Uighurs were held in the camps.
An Associated Press story from late June reported that “The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.”
According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition of genocide includes “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
