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.