Evidence of meeting #122 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chinese.
A video is available from Parliament.
The Chair Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)
I call the meeting to order.
We have our witnesses via video conference today. We are in the study regarding the human rights situation of the Uighurs.
Today we have with us Farida Deif, who is the Canadian director of Human Rights Watch Canada; and Adrian Zenz. Welcome to both witnesses.
I will start with Ms. Deif.
Farida Deif Canada Director, Human Rights Watch Canada
Madam Chair and honourable members of Parliament, thank you for inviting me to appear before this committee to discuss the current human rights situation of the Uighurs.
Last month, Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Eradicating Ideological Viruses: China's Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang's Muslims.” The report presents new evidence of the Chinese government's mass arbitrary detention, torture and mistreatment of Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang and details the increasingly pervasive controls on daily life.
As you know, China's abusive “strike hard” campaign began in Xinjiang in 2014, but the level of repression increased dramatically after Communist party secretary Chen Quanguo relocated from Tibet to assume leadership of Xinjiang in late 2016.
Since then, the authorities have stepped up mass arbitrary detention, including in pretrial detention centres and prisons, both of which are formal facilities, and in political education camps. Credible estimates indicate that one million people are being held in the camps, where Turkic Muslims are being forced to learn Mandarin Chinese and sing praises of the Chinese Communist Party. Those who resist or are deemed to have failed to learn are punished.
The detainees in political education camps are held without any due process rights, neither charged nor put on trial, and they have no access to lawyers or family. They are held for having links with foreign countries or using foreign communication tools such as WhatsApp, or even for peacefully expressing their identity and religion, none of which constitute crimes.
A former detainee described conditions in the political education camps to Human Rights Watch. He said:
I resisted their measures.... They put me in a small solitary confinement cell...in a space of about 2 x 2 metres. I was not given any food or drink, my hands were handcuffed in the back, and I had to stand for 24 hours without sleep.
Outside these detention facilities, the Chinese authorities subject Turkic Muslims to such extreme restrictions on personal life that in many ways their experiences resemble those of the people detained. A combination of administrative measures, checkpoints and passport controls restrict their movements. They are subjected to persistent political indoctrination, including compulsory flag-raising ceremonies, political meetings and Mandarin night schools.
The authorities have also subjected people in Xinjiang to pervasive and constant surveillance. They encourage neighbours to spy on each other. They employ high-tech mass surveillance systems that make use of QR codes, biometrics, artificial intelligence, phone spyware and big data. They have mobilized over a million officials and police officers to monitor people, including through intrusive programs in which monitors are assigned to live in Uighurs' homes.
The “Strike Hard” campaign has also had serious implications abroad. The Xinjiang authorities have made foreign ties a punishable offence. The government has barred Turkic Muslims from contacting people overseas. It has also pressured some ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs living outside the country to return to China, while requiring others to provide detailed information about their lives abroad.
In recent years, the Chinese government has also stepped up pressure on other governments to forcibly return Uighurs in their countries back to China.
The Chinese government's religious restrictions are so severe that it has effectively outlawed Islam in Xinjiang. It has banned certain facial hair and religious clothing, prohibited children from learning religion, and confiscated prayer mats and the Quran. Officials closely monitor people's religious practices. The Chinese government even detained people for praying five times a day or circulating religious text among family members.
As one ethnic Uighur explained to Human Rights Watch:
What they [the Chinese authorities] want is to force us to assimilate, to identify with the country, such that, in the future, the idea of Uyghur will be in name only, but without its meaning.
An ethnic Uighur woman told us:
We have no rights in Xinjiang.... They scare us so much. Living there changes your way of being. You become afraid of [people in] uniforms, you're afraid of telling the truth, you're afraid of praying, you're afraid of being a Muslim.
The “strike hard” campaign has also divided families. Some members in Xinjiang and others abroad are caught unexpectedly by the tightening of passport controls and border crossings. Children have at times been trapped in one country without their parents. Reports of children of detained Turkic Muslims being placed in orphanages against their families' wishes are particularly alarming. By sending children in Xinjiang to state institutions, the Chinese government is only adding to the trauma of the “strike hard” campaign.
To be clear, the scale and scope of abuses in Xinjiang are unlike anything Human Rights Watch has seen in China in decades. Not just the numbers of people held, but the abuses—the systematic abuses region-wide—are unprecedented. In addition, the impact goes beyond China to Uighurs globally, including Uighur Canadians here at home. It's unlike anything we've seen before.
These rampant abuses violate fundamental rights of freedom of expression, freedom of religion and privacy, and protections from torture and unfair trials. More broadly, the Chinese authorities' controls over day-to-day life in Xinjiang primarily affect ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities, in violation of international law prohibitions against discrimination.
Xinjiang's crisis is symptomatic of the deepening repression across China under President Xi Jinping. China's global power has largely protected it from international scrutiny. A failure of concerned governments to push back against this repression will only embolden Beijing both at home and abroad.
It's clear that China does not see a significant political cost to its widespread human rights violations in Xinjiang. This must change. We therefore ask this committee to urge the Government of Canada to take several concrete actions.
First, the Government of Canada should publicly and privately call on the Chinese government at the highest levels to end the “strike hard” campaign. Canada should impose targeted sanctions through the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act against party secretary Chen Quanguo and other senior officials linked to abuses in the strike hard campaign.
Canada should also impose appropriate export control mechanisms to deny China access to surveillance and other technologies used to violate basic rights in Xinjiang, and Canada should investigate the Chinese government's intimidation of Turkic Muslim diaspora communities across Canada.
Next, we also urge this committee to recommend that the Government of Canada not forcibly return Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims to China without a full and fair individualized examination of the risk of being persecuted, tortured or ill-treated in China. This government should also expedite asylum claims of Turkic Muslims at risk of being forcibly returned to China.
To conclude, there is no question that China should be held to account for its mass, systematic violations in Xinjiang. Some governments have begun to speak out against these repressive policies and have taken steps to protect the Uighur diaspora at home and asylum-seekers from further harm. Canada should follow suit. It is clear that stronger, more concerted action is needed from this government to increase the political cost to China of its oppressive campaign against Xinjiang Muslims.
Thank you very much.
Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)
Thank you very much, Ms. Deif.
Now we will go to our second witness, Dr. Adrian Zenz, who is a professor at the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany.
Adrian Zenz As an Individual
Firstly, I would like to thank the chair and the Subcommittee on International Human Rights for inviting me to testify.
The research performed by others and myself conclusively shows the existence of a large-scale extrajudicial detention network for the purpose of subjecting Xinjiang's Muslim minorities, but also some ethnic Christians, to intensive political re-education and indoctrination procedures.
The evidence I gathered largely comes from the Chinese government itself. A detailed account of my research, including on police recruitments and the installation of surveillance systems, is publicly available.
In August 2018, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination accused China of detaining over one million Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, in extrajudicial re-education camps. China flatly denied the existence of re-education camps, with the representative Hu Lianhe arguing that criminals “involved only in minor offences” are assigned “to vocational education and employment training centres to acquire employment skills and legal knowledge”.
In a recent interview, Xinjiang's governor Shohrat Zakir likewise acknowledged that those “suspected of minor criminal offences” are “provided...with free vocational training through vocational education institutions”. Successful trainees can receive “certificates of completion”.
However, a recent amendment to Xinjiang's de-extremification ordinance specifically refers to vocational skills training centres as re-education institutions: in Chinese, [Witness speaks Mandarin], a term that Hu Lianhe and Shohrat Zakir carefully avoid in their statements.
Recently, the Xinjiang government launched a publicity initiative talking about vocational skills training to help rescue ignorant, backward and poor rural minorities. A related TV clip was produced and shown on Chinese television, CCTV. However, these accounts are highly selective. Footage only shows the top of a building, without showing us the surrounding extensive security features. Footage of a classroom, however, shows no less than five security cameras in the back. The statements of several internees come across very stilted, with major discrepancies between their words and their body language, in some ways reminiscent of false confessions. Much of what is said on that TV clip appears to have been memorized beforehand.
From public bid documents, we know that many of these training camps were commissioned with extensive security features. Similar features such as high fences, walls, watchtowers and so on, are visible from satellite footage of the possible location of the facility featured on this TV program. Bid documents also indicate a clear link between vocational skills training of this type...which I would clearly differentiate from proper or genuine, or professional vocational education.
Some of these facilities have been commissioned with hundreds of police and police stations located either nearby or on the facility. Some of these compounds have a re-education facility, using the actual term for political re-education, whose history can be traced to the former, and now abolished, nationwide re-education-through-labour system and these supposed skills-training facilities.
It is disconcerting, especially in the statements of Xinjiang's governor and of the CCTV piece that was produced, the portrayal of the Uighurs' poor farmers, who are supposedly naturally inclined towards extremism just because they are not wage labourers who speak Chinese well or are tightly integrated into mainstream society. This particular perspective is driven by communist materialist ideology that presumes that with improved material conditions, all human beings will naturally tend toward atheism or naturalism. However, since religious belief has been persisting and deepening among many Chinese minorities—even the Han majority, and especially among Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, also in response to what they perceive as ethnocultural discrimination, the authorities have, step by step, increased their securitization drive.
China does face a credible terrorism threat from a fairly small number of Uighur groups who, from what we can tell, have by now been neutralized and disbanded. The present re-education campaign represents a severe and extensive violation of the most basic human rights, which is not only unlikely to achieve the stated aim of deradicalization but is also quite likely to deepen and promote new radicalization among Muslim populations in Xinjiang who previously had no affinity with extremist ideology.
First, I encourage the Government of Canada to publicly name and to condemn Xinjiang's re-education campaign. I encourage the government to not exclusively rely on quiet or vector diplomacy, which would in my opinion ultimately not make a difference. Second, I would encourage the government to not extradite back to China any Muslim from Xinjiang who is currently in Canada, because of the present human rights concerns.
Thank you.
Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)
Thank you very much.
I am going to suggest, if we have the unanimous consent of the committee, that we limit all the questions to five minutes. That way we'll get through both of the rounds.
Do we agree to that?
Conservative
David Sweet Conservative Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON
Madam Chair, I noticed on our schedule that there is some business—
Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)
It's just five minutes at the end to discuss one witness.
Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)
We'll start with Mr. Anderson, for five minutes.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
Thank you.
I wish I had more time with you today. This is an important subject.
I just want to raise some concerns we had the other day. Global Affairs was in to speak to us. I don't know whether you heard their testimony. In light of the points you made—that there have been publicly acknowledged surveillance activities and deployment of police, that camps are now being seen as legal entities, and that there has been satellite footage of the camps for a number of months.... They were very reluctant to acknowledge that these accounts are accurate, but they were willing to acknowledge that something is going on there. They would not basically accept the overall sense that this is as serious as it is.
I'm wondering whether you have any suggestions for how we might convince the government that this is actually serious enough that they need to take action.
A secondary question is, how bad does a country have to be in violating international norms before governments such as ours should stand up to say, this is going to begin to affect the marketplace for both you and us as well?
That question is for either one of you.
Canada Director, Human Rights Watch Canada
In terms of the number and the scale of detentions, there is very credible evidence and information about the mass detentions in these education camps, and it is very difficult for a government to claim that all of the information is fabricated and that there aren't widespread and systematic abuses occurring, both in the detention facilities and among the everyday population in Xinjiang. That is just simply unavoidable.
The question I would have for the government really is, if they are not willing to acknowledge the accuracy of the reports, would they at least call on the Government of China to allow independent investigators to enter Xinjiang and assess and investigate whether those reports are credible or not? Human Rights Watch, for example, has no access to Xinjiang, nor do journalists. Those who have been able to enter are only able to enter in a very monitored fashion, which in many ways actually puts at risk the individuals they are interviewing. If there are issues of accuracy, I would call on this government to request an independent assessment and urge China to agree to one.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
Let me cut you off there; I only have five minutes. and I want to address something that both of you spoke about, which is the scale and scope of this being beyond anything we've seen for decades.
We're familiar with the approach to Tibet, and we've seen some other places around the world where there has been repression, but what's interesting is that we see this spreading across provinces. Now we begin to see it spreading across ethnic and faith groups. I wonder whether you can comment on that. I think the Christians in various communities or provinces are now seeing the application of some of these repressive measures as well.
Can you comment on this? I'll give you the rest of my time to do so, if you both have something to say.
Dr. Zenz, if you want to lead off, we can then come back to Human Rights Watch.
As an Individual
I think there's great concern that China is creating a real precedent. Of course, we know that all of China has significantly stepped up the persecution of religion, especially in 2018 with the new laws on religion. China is very likely to learn from the methods in Xinjiang how far they can go.
I have argued in my research that this represents an entire level up from the police state that has been created in Tibetan areas, for example, and then in Xinjiang. A re-education drive of this extent has not been seen since the 1950s and 1960s, although back then it was not as systematic, it did not have high tech, and it did not have the same economic resources to power the political indoctrination campaign that we see now.
The Chinese authorities are likely to learn from these methods and then apply them elsewhere. I've argued in an article of mine that we might see different and adaptive forms of indoctrination and re-education camps in other places, or even that these methods may be exported to other authoritarian nations.
Second, and this may relate a bit to what you said before, if what is occurring in Xinjiang today, on this scale, is not challenged in strong ways by the international community in other nations, then my question would be, what would be? How bad would it have to get? The Chinese will, if this is not sufficiently challenged, be emboldened to do anything. That is very much how China has operated in the past, seeing what it can get away with.
We already have seen in the past 10 days a response to the international media coverage and to what international institutions and nations are saying. The Chinese are now coming forward with what you could call a propaganda or marketing campaign in response. If we had said nothing, even that would not have been necessary. They would have remained at a denial stage.
Now, then, we have moved from a denial stage to acknowledgement and justification. But that is not enough. It has to go one step further.
Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)
Unfortunately, that is your time, but you can revisit this in a further question if you need to.
We will now move to Ms. Khalid for five minutes.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for your very compelling testimony today.
I want to continue, Dr. Zenz, from where you left off. What happens when nothing is done? Do you see this moving towards ethnic cleansing, towards genocide? What is the ultimate outcome of this for China?
As an Individual
The ultimate goal is not to literally destroy, kill or eliminate an ethnic minority. In China, both in past centuries and in the present—the 20th century, the modern Chinese state, nowadays since 1949 the Communist Party—there has been a very consistent self-portrayal of China as a multi-ethnic empire.
The Chinese want to be multi-ethnic, and of course, for the Han Chinese, culture and race are seen as the centre. The minorities complement and create the glory of this empire, so they must exist; however, they have to be in some ways sufficiently assimilated into firstly the Han race and culture.
We're talking, then, about a cultural and a linguistic assimilation—although minority language education does exist—but as in the Hui and Tibetan case, it is not seen as acceptable if the minorities don't speak Chinese well.
The second axis of assimilation is along the lines of socialist or communist ideology, meaning that religion is suspect and inherently problematic. Faith or belief in the party comes first, and that's very much the intention of the re-education campaign, and it's what we hear from witnesses. That must come first. If you have some kind of secondary belief and go to some kind of church that is government-approved, government-controlled—
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
I'm sorry, Dr. Zenz, I'm going to cut you off there. I have a few more questions.
We've heard testimony before this committee of organ harvesting occurring within the Uighur community in China. We know that's something that other communities, such as the Falun Gong, have also been speaking out about within theirs.
Let me ask Human Rights Watch, Dr. Deif, whether this is something that you've heard as well.
Canada Director, Human Rights Watch Canada
We've certainly heard reports, not through out testimonies in Xinjiang but in other reports, of organ harvesting, but I can't really speak to that issue in more detail, because we haven't done the research on it directly.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
When you're doing the research and are collecting the testimonies and the first-hand evidence, what do you anticipate doing with it, as an organization?
Canada Director, Human Rights Watch Canada
It really is to first highlight the abuse and the scale and the severity of the human rights abuses taking place. Its main goal really is to stop the practice, to end the “strike hard” campaign, to convince concerned governments such as the Canadian government to take action.
That goal is expressed through a number of different recommendations that we've made. One is to publicly condemn the abuses that are occurring in Xinjiang and, if there's any concern about the validity of the detention centres, to call for a UN investigative team to investigate the situation.
I think we know quite well, however, that China in many ways is allowed to use its political and economic might to muzzle criticism of its actions around the world. If we are not vocal about the repression that's occurring in China, it will only be replicated in other communities. If the scale and the severity of the abuses taking place in Xinjiang were happening in any other country, we would see investigations occurring, a call for special mechanisms, an increasingly robust response by the international community. Unfortunately China, because it is China and because the abuses are happening there, is really in many ways given a free pass.
Ms. Anita Vandenbeld (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)
We'll go to Ms. Hardcastle for five minutes.
NDP
Cheryl Hardcastle NDP Windsor—Tecumseh, ON
Just to take off from my colleague's questions with regard to the international community's vocal response and active response, Ms. Deif, I think you provided us with a list of recommendations about making public declarations and individual targeted economic sanctions. We've also heard from Mr. Zenz suggestions that the international community be more robust in the way it responds.
What are some of the tools we can use to that end in terms of using exports and our trade relationships? Is there something that you see as key that Canada can be doing right now?
Canada Director, Human Rights Watch Canada
I think there's a lot more that Canada can be doing right now. Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past few months is that beyond an expression of concern in Geneva at the United Nations Human Rights Council there has been no public statement denouncing the abuses happening in Xinjiang by this government, and that is incredibly concerning.
In the immediate term, I think it would be very important to use Canada's new targeted sanctions mechanism, the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, to sanction party leaders and other senior officials who are linked to the “strike hard” campaign. That's something Canada can do immediately through Global Affairs.
Another thing is not forceably returning ethnic Uighurs to China. What we've seen in Germany and Sweden, for example—two allies of Canada—is that they have suspended all returns of Uighur asylum seekers to China, given the scale and severity of the abuses and the risk that they would be disappeared or be detained there. Canada should follow suit. There is no reason that there can't be a moratorium or a freezing of returns of Uighurs to China.
We have a situation in Canada as well in which you have about 2,000 Uighur Canadians who have collected and compiled a list of 300 family members who are currently detained in those camps. They are doing very strong advocacy across Ottawa to ensure that those abuses get to the highest levels of power.
In terms of immigration policy I think there's a lot more we can do. We can expedite asylum claims of Turkic Muslims at risk of being forceably returned. There are several hundred Uighur Muslims still trapped in Turkey. In the same way as for the Chechnyan gay men, we can do what we did for them in the case of these asylum seekers and indicate to the world that Canada takes the protection of Uighurs very seriously and will take action through immigration policy to expedite their claims, to ensure they are not returned to harm.