HUMAN RIGHTS
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers, are internment camps operated by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region government and its Chinese Communist Party (CCP) provincial committee.
More than 60 detention sites were worked upon between July 2019 and July 2020, while 14 camps are still under construction, the reportsaid.
The camps were established under CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s administration.
Who is being held?
As of 2019, it was estimated that Chinese authorities may have detained one and a half million people, mostly Uyghurs but also including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis.
Those sent to such camps are not put on trial, have no access to lawyers or right to challenge the decision. The authorities decide when an individual has been “transformed”, so the prisoners could be left to languish in detention for months.
Available evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees in Xinjiang’s vast “re-education” network are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities, including newly built or expanded prisons, or sent to walled factory compounds for coerced labour assignments.
How is life inside the camps?
Men, Women and elderlies are detained in separate camps from the children, where we can also find teachers whose goal is to “re-educate” and brainwash those children: the authorities label the camps as centres for “transformation-through-education”.
The government submits the prisoners to physical pain. People taken in custody are locked in a small room without hygienic facilities; they shave the detainees’ heads and tie their hands with handcuffs. At sunrise, the prisoners are woken up and forced to learn and sing propaganda songs in chinese. The ones who stand up to these rules are tortured in the “black room”.
The detainees are submitted to medical experiments, too: they are compelled to take pills and injections which are supposed to ward off illnesses and infections.
Who is accusing China?
Beijing has faced international condemnation for its network of detention centres. The US has placed sanctions on Chinese politicians allegedly involved and earlier this month blocked some exports it said had been made with “forced labor”.
Human Rights Watch claims that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a “people’s war on terror,” a policy announced in 2014. The camps have been criticized by many countries and human rights organizations for alleged human rights abuses, mistreatment, rape, and torture, with some alleging genocide. Some countries have expressed support for the camps instead.
How do they cover up?
A BBC journalist who went to the camps says that one by one the people they spoke to inside, some of them visibly nervous, told them similar stories. The muslims said that they’d been “infected by extremism” and that they’d volunteered to have their “thoughts transformed”.
The Chinese government denies all the claims saying it’s a “re-education” system, which aims to tackle poverty and religious extremism in Xinjiang: according to them, the camps are a necessary measure against terrorism and people willingly attend special “vocational schools
