Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on July 20th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome, everybody. Just off the bat, let me thank our interpreting team and our technical team here for getting everybody organized and ready to go.

Welcome to meeting number four of the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

Pursuant to the motion adopted by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development on February 20, 2020, the subcommittee is meeting on its study of the human rights situation of the Uighurs.

Today’s witnesses are mainly appearing by video conference, and the proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I'd like to outline a few rules to follow for our witnesses. Interpretation in this video conference will work very much like in a regular committee meeting. You have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of either floor, English or French.

As you are speaking, if you plan to alternate from one language to the other, you will need to also switch the interpretation channel so it aligns with the language you are speaking. You may want to allow for a short pause when switching languages.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. When you are ready to speak, you can click on the microphone icon to activate your mike.

When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute.

Should any technical challenges arise, for example in relation to interpretation or a problem with your audio, please advise me, the chair, immediately, and the technical team will work to resolve them.

We have many amazing and courageous witnesses here with us today. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize our focus on Uighurs. Several of our witnesses are experts in human rights in general, and some with an emphasis on China. There are and will be opportunities through future meetings of this committee and other government committees to address many issues in respect to China and other human rights issues. I say this because our witnesses are here to share their expertise on Uighurs. To reiterate, we need to focus on Uighurs.

Everybody seems like they're ready to go. Welcome, witnesses. You will have six minutes for your opening statements.

First, we're going to hear from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Dr. Adrian Zenz, senior fellow in China studies. Next, as an individual, we have Dr. Olsi Jazexhi, professor and journalist.

Then, sharing a six-minute slot, we have David Kilgour, former member, and former chair of this committee. We stand on your shoulders, Mr. Kilgour. We also have Dr. Raziya Mahmut, vice-president, International Support for Uyghurs. I understand it will be five minutes for Dr. Mahmut and one minute for Mr. Kilgour.

Next, as an individual, we have Jacob Kovalio, associate professor, Carleton University.

If the witnesses are ready, we are going to hear from Dr. Zenz for his six-minute statement. You may proceed, Dr. Zenz.

[Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow in China Studies, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation]

Thank you for inviting me to testify at this hearing.

Since 2017, up to 1.8 million Uighurs and other ethnic minority groups in the the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang have been swept up in probably the largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust. Exiled Uighurs and researchers have described this campaign as a cultural genocide.

New research gives strong evidence that Beijing's actions in Xinjiang also meet the physical genocide criterion cited in section (d) of article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.

Starting in 2018, a growing number of female internment camp survivors testified that they were given injections that coincided with changes in or cessation of their menstrual cycles. Others reported that they were forcibly fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices, abbreviated as IUDs, prior to internment or subjected to sterilization surgeries.

Also in 2018, official natural population growth rates in Xinjiang plummeted. In Kashgar and Hotan, two Uighur heartland regions, combined natural population growth rates fell by 84% between 2015 and 2018. In 2019, birth rates in ethnic minority regions declined by a further 30% to 56%. For 2020, one minority prefecture set a natural population growth target of near zero, specifically 1.05 per mille, a record low and a major drop in the natural population growth of that same region.

New evidence shows that drastic declines in population growth are not merely linked with the campaign of mass internment but also related to a systematic state policy to prevent births in minority regions. With many men, husbands and community leaders being detained in camps, nothing prevents the state from seizing complete control over female minority reproductive systems.

First, three different government documents show that those who violate birth prevention policies are punished with internment. Punishments for violations of birth control policies have become far more draconian, especially in 2018.

Second, in 2018, a stunning 80% of all newly placed IUDs in China, estimated by subtracting new IUD placements from removals, were fitted in Xinjiang, even though the region only makes up 1.8% of the country's population. By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subvert over 80% of women of child-bearing age in the southern four minority prefectures to birth control measures with—quote, unquote—“long-term effectiveness”. This refers to either IUDs or sterilizations.

Third, Xinjiang's health commission budgeted 260 million Chinese yuan, or $50 million Canadian, in 2019 and 2020 to fund free birth prevention surgeries. Family planning documents from two Uighur counties show specific target figures for mass female sterilization, stating respectively that 14% and 34% of all rural women of reproductive age are to be subjected to tubal ligation sterilization. The entire region-wide program had sufficient funds in 2019 and 2020 for hundreds of thousands of such sterilizations, and some regions indicated that additional central government funds had been channelled into this campaign.

In addition, in 2019 and 2020, Xinjiang budgeted about 1.5 billion Chinese yuan or $291 million Canadian for financial rewards for women who supposedly voluntarily opted for IUDs or sterilizations even though they are legally permitted to have more children.

In my estimation, all of these measures combined allow the Chinese state to permanently maintain Uighur natural population growth rates at levels that are 85% to 95% below those of the past two decades. The government can dial minority birth rates up and down at will, like opening or closing a faucet.

This new evidence is reflective not only of what we may call demographic genocide but also of a strategy of ethno-racial supremacy. Between 2015 and 2018 an estimated two million what we must assume to be Han Chinese migrants moved to Xinjiang from other parts of China, lured by lucrative job offers, free housing and free land.

I call upon the Canadian government to publicly condemn these practices, to perform a full legal determination of the nature of the atrocities that are taking place in the region and to impose sanctions on Xinjiang's political leadership.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

Now we go to Dr. Olsi Jazexhi, for six minutes, please.

[Dr. Olsi Jazexhi, Professor and Journalist, As an Individual]

Hello, everyone.

My name is Olsi Jazexhi. I'm a historian and a scholar of Islam.

In 2019 I wanted to understand the situation of the Muslims in Xinjiang. For this reason, I visited Xinjiang from August 16 to 25. We were a group of journalists invited by the State Council Information Office of China and Xinjiang.

During our visit, which lasted almost nine days, we had the chance to get a number of lectures delivered to us by Communist Party officials, and also to visit the situation on the ground. We visited three cities: Urumqi, Aksu and Kashgar.

We stayed for around three days in Urumqi, which is the capital of Xinjiang. We were presented with a number of white papers produced by the Chinese government about the situation in Xinjiang or East Turkestan. The people who delivered these white papers were Communist Party officials, people like Xu Guixiang and Ma Pinyan.

In the historical presentations that we had, for me at least as a professional historian, the narrative the Chinese Communist Party officials were giving us was that Xinjiang had historically been Han Chinese. It had belonged to the Buddhist culture, but the native Turkic people of Xinjiang, the Uighurs, who are the majority, the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tatars and other ethnic groups were latecomers.

The official narrative of the Communist Party officials for us was that Islam was a foreign religion, a religion that was imposed by force on the Uighurs. The duty of the Communist Party of China, in a few words, was to remove any connection with the Islamic culture of these people and turn them back into their so-called native culture and religion which was connected with Buddhism and Han Chinese.

We visited the museum of Xinjiang in Urumqi, the Aksu museum and the Kashgar museum. In these museums, the Chinese government delivered the same kind of historical narrative, whereby the Uighurs and their religion, Islam, was depicted as foreign and as the source of extremism and terrorism. The whole narrative was that this region had historically belonged to Imperial China.

Apart from visiting these museums, we also visited two vocational training centres, or what we call, in the west, concentration camps.

The first vocational training centre that we visited was in the city of Aksu, the Onsu County Vocational Skills Training Center. The Chinese government wanted to present this first vocational centre to us, as foreign journalists, as being schools and not prisons. They were in fact prisons.

People have seen my videos on YouTube. I uploaded them when I was in Aksu at the time that I visited the concentration camp. I asked our Chinese hosts a number of questions.

Number one, I asked them, “Who are these people you are keeping here in these centres?” The Chinese claim was that these people were students. I then asked them, “Are these people allowed to go to their home?” The answer was no.

Number two, I investigated what they were doing in these concentration camps. These people didn't have access to a phone, Internet, or their families. These people had been taken from their homes two years before.

We entered the concentration camp, which the Chinese authorities had designed as a school. They wanted us to film these people singing and dancing in order to show the outside world that these were not concentration camps but schools. We started to ask these prisoners about their conditions. Number one, we started speaking to them in their Turkish language. We were greeting them in their native language. We said, “As-salaam alaikum” or “Yahshi mu siz,” which mean “peace be with you” and “how are you”. The Uighurs who understood us very well were afraid to respond in their native language. They responded in Chinese.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

We are going to move to our next witnesses, Dr. Raziya Mahmut and Mr. David Kilgour.

Go ahead for six minutes, please.

[David Kilgour, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, distinguished members.

Dr. Mahmut speaks perfect French, so you're welcome to speak to her in French.

I'll be very short. I will just say that last December in Brussels at an event sponsored by the World Uyghur Congress, I made the point that forced organ pillaging from Uighurs in Xinjiang predates that from Falun Gong members, which, as I'm sure you know, began in about 2001. In 1995 surgeon Enver Tohti in Urumqi was ordered to an execution ground to remove vital organs from a wounded but still living prisoner. Appalled by what he had done, Tohti later left China.

Ethan Gutmann's book The Slaughter estimates that the organs of 65,000 Falun Gong and 2,000 to 4,000 Uighurs, Tibetans and Christians were harvested in the 2000 to 2008 period.

Finally, Dr. Mahmut is a Canadian of East Turkestan origin. She has two master's degrees, one from the University of Montreal and one from Brussels. She has a Ph.D. from Carleton in biology. She is a scientist but she is appearing on behalf of International Support for Uyghurs and in her private capacity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

[Dr. Raziya Mahmut, Vice-President, International Support for Uyghurs]

Good morning, Mr. Chair and distinguished members.

It's an honour to be here.

To begin, I will go straight to our topic, which is the worst human rights tragedy in my homeland. We call it, as I know it, East Turkestan, but China calls it Xinjiang.

Uighurs have always faced systemic discrimination and have a long and painful history of human rights violations under China's Communist Party regime.

As an example, 60 years ago the region was chosen as a nuclear test site. It was the only nuclear test site used in China but it was the largest in the world. This nuclear testing had terrible long-term implications for our homeland. For example, our homeland and traditional way of life have disappeared. There is widespread environmental degradation and health-related issues are enormous. For example, the rate of cancer is 30% to 35% higher than the state average and birth defects are commonplace.

Sadly, nuclear testing has happened for 60 years. Sadly the CCP's imperialism and complete disregard for the Uighur peoples does not end with its nuclear testing ambition. Now, it's 2020 and mounting public evidence shows ongoing atrocities on an unprecedented scale in occupied East Turkestan. It's estimated that up to three million Uighurs and other Kazakh minority people are locked up in concentration camps.

The Turkic people have been detained in concentration camps where they are enduring horrific conditions, torture and brainwashing. Children whose parents have been detained in concentration camps are being sent to state-run orphanages. They are forced to assimilate. There are the invasive home stays of Chinese officials, concern around organ harvesting, beauty products made using the hair of detainees, and the list goes on.

Earlier this year, the Australians started a public initiative to uncover a mass scale of Uighurs and the other Turkic people transferred to forced labour camps, and the first manufactured consumer products for export to the west, such as textiles, automotive parts, electronics, and much more.

Very recently we learned that Beijing is conducting widespread forced sterilization and abortion on Uighur women. Dr. Zenz is an expert on this. The world has known since 2016 about the CCP's concentration camps that are part of its official strategy of dehumanization, assimilation and genocide under the pretext of the people's war on terror.

Even before then, Beijing disregarded Uighur human rights. For example, Uighur activist and Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil has been imprisoned in China since 2006.

The CCP has turned East Turkestan into a brutal totalitarian police state. Everything that makes us unique has been targeted: our language, culture, history, religion and identity. Our books and our history have been rewritten. Thousands of our mosques, shrines, graveyards and other sites of cultural and religious significance have been destroyed as the CCP targets us to erase traces of our very existence.

We Uighurs now refer to ourselves as a people destroyed.

As you know, this committee held a hearing on this issue in 2018. I was here, and it doesn't seem to have moved the Canadian government to act. Let's hope today's hearing has a greater impact.

This committee could help by issuing a formal statement demanding that Chairman Xi Jinping immediately abolish the concentration camps and release the detainees. We are calling on the Canadian government to use its Magnitsky legislation to target China's Communist officials for perpetrating gross and systematic human rights violations against Uighurs.

We are calling on the government to grant asylum to Uighurs and Kazakhs from China, with a blanket refusal to deport them back.

The Uighur community is suffering profoundly and we hope that Canada will help us stop this horror.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Dr. Mahmut and Mr. Kilgour.

We will now go to our final witness for panel one, Mr. Jacob Kovalio, associate professor at Carleton University.

[Jacob Kovalio, Associate Professor, Carleton University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I value the opportunity to participate in this virtual round table on the human rights situation of the Uighur people in China. I will address that first, followed by my assessment of the Beijing regime.

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, which the local Uighur aboriginal people know as East Turkestan, is a very large area of 1.7 million square kilometres. It is relatively sparsely populated, very rich in natural resources and located most strategically at the heart of Xi Jinping's belt and road initiative.

China has a non-monotheistic culture where religion has always been subservient to the state, unlike the Uighur culture, where Islam is an integral part of life, as Buddhism is in Tibet. The pretext for anti-Uighur policies over the past decade is what Beijing calls separatism, extremism and terrorism.

These are the measures enforced since the so-called strike hard campaign against violent terrorism in Xinjiang in May 2014, and especially since 2016, when Chen Quanguo became Xinjiang Communist Party boss. There is relentless surveillance using closed-circuit television, artificial intelligence, facial recognition and biometric data. A new grid surveillance system, where each square contains 500 people for stronger surveillance, has just been completed. There are hundreds of so-called vocational re-education as well as forced labour camps, where around 1.2 million Uighurs, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, are incarcerated. The focus is on Mandarin training, intense Han Chinese nationalist indoctrination and strict discipline.

Many Uighurs are forced to host Han Chinese agents into their families as so-called family members who train their hosts in Mandarin and Chinese nationalism. Beards and hijab are very strongly discouraged. Contraception and the sterilization of women, as has been already referred to, are pushed. Muhammad and Medina are not allowed as names for new babies. All these steps aim at assimilation through sinification or monoculturalism. Sinification is accelerated through Han settlers moving into Xinjiang.

What kind of a regime is the “people's republic” in name only, ruled over by the Chinese Communist Party also by name only? In an intriguing case of dire history repeated, in a process launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and completed by Xi Jinping in March 2018, China has evolved from Maoist Communism to what I call, in a purely descriptive designation, fascism or Confucian fascism with Han Chinese characteristics for the new era.

To Mussolini's “everything within the state, nothing against the state and nothing outside the fascist state”, Xi Jinping's slogan is that the country, the military, society, schools, north, south, east and west, all belong to the Communist Party state. Weiwen, preserving social stability, is the foundation of the domestic policy of the regime, the Chinese version of Gleichschaltung.

Marxism and fascism differ only on one thing, and that's private property, which fascism allows. However, unlike liberal democracies, the Beijing regime, since 2012 lorded over by the never-elected strongman-for-life Xi Jinping, because of its overwhelming political power has the last word on large private businesses as well. Most of China's top businessmen are members of the Chinese Communist Party. Marx and Mao, Xi Jinping's heroes, are probably spinning in their graves.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I apologize, Mr. Kovalio, but could you move your microphone a little lower?

[Jacob Kovalio]

Yes.

Is this better?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Good. Thank you.

[Jacob Kovalio]

I have just a few sentences left.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We have very little time, so that's good.

[Jacob Kovalio]

In terms of China's core interests, heshin ri'i is the term for Beijing's aggressive, not assertive, foreign policy in the past 15 years. Indeed, it's the Chinese version of Lebensraum, the “living space” foreign policy of Germany until 1945.

China and Russia are the two most successful imperialist powers in history. In 2020 they co-lead the 21st century version of the anti-democratic axis of yore , which also includes Pakistan, Iran and Turkey.

In the context of the legal aspects of the present crisis in Ottawa-Beijing relations, remarks by Professor Samantha Hoffman of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute are highly relevant:

In China there is no such thing as the rule of law. Regulations that can be largely apolitical on the surface can be political when the Communist Party of China (CCP) decides to use them for political purposes.

There are no genuine protections for the people and entities subject to the system.

I shortened my original presentation to fit within the six minutes allotted to me. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you so much, Mr. Kovalio.

Witnesses, I want to thank all of you for your remarks.

We'll now move to the members, who will have an opportunity to ask the witnesses questions. Each member will have seven minutes.

We are going to get started with Mr. Genuis for our first seven minutes.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you so much, witnesses, for your powerful testimony.

Also thank you to everybody who is watching at home. Everybody who is watching these hearings as well is part of this important history of bearing witness to these atrocities. I know those who are watching will tell others, and that's very important.

I have a couple of introductory comments.

I want to thank the clerk for putting together an incredible list of witnesses. Over the next couple of days we have a top-notch lineup of experts who are going to really help us understand and respond to this situation.

As well, I want to say that I am very keen on having the Canada-China committee up and running to look at other issues of this relationship. We're focusing today on a specific issue, which is the Uighur genocide, but we've already heard some testimony, especially from Professor Kovalio, that underlines the need for a broader and deeper re-examination. I am hopeful that through continuing advocacy we'll be able to have the Canada-China committee working as well.

I want to acknowledge that today, July 20, is also a very important day for the Falun Gong community, the anniversary of the beginning of persecution. As David Kilgour mentioned, there is a significant connection in terms of both Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners being victims of organ harvesting, so we acknowledge the Falun Gong community and all other communities that have been victims of horrific persecution in the PRC.

We've heard the witnesses discuss a number of important issues in terms of the Canadian response to these events: legal determinations, genocide recognition and the use of Magnitsky sanctions.

I want to start my questions with Professor Zenz.

On another aspect of our response, our engagement with corporate entities, I know you had some comments on Twitter recently about Nuctech. We've just found out that the Canadian government is hiring Nuctech to supply security technology for our embassies. You've noted that Nuctech sells technology to the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, which is sanctioned by the U.S. in connection with human rights abuses against Uighurs.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on how we should be engaging or not engaging with the corporate entities that may be involved in Xinjiang.

Also related to that, the U.S. has passed some tough new legislation, the Uighur forced labour prevention act, aimed at sanctioning companies and addressing supply chains so that we're not complicit in what's happening in Xinjiang.

Could you speak to that, Mr. Zenz? Then if other witnesses want to weigh in on that point as well, I'd appreciate hearing from them.

[Adrian Zenz]

This is an excellent point. There are three things that we as western countries, democratic countries, can do.

The first is that we can call the child by its name very clearly, the atrocities in Xinjiang. The second thing is that we can impose sanctions on government officials. But the topic you are raising here is, in my opinion, the most strategic one: imposing consequences.

First of all, uncovering, highlighting and naming implicated companies, Chinese companies notably, that are complicit in the atrocities in Xinjiang, such as Huawei, such as Nuctech—which I did read about, yes—and other companies, is so important. That's something we can do, because it is, in my opinion, appropriate to impose consequences on Chinese companies that are implicated in Xinjiang. There are western companies, of course, as well, but western companies tend to be less implicated in Xinjiang. These companies, however, directly supply security and surveillance technology that enable the police state. In my opinion, it would be highly appropriate for governments to name these companies and then to have debates on them. I would absolutely advocate that one would impose certain forms of sanctions or consequences or penalties on them.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you.

You mentioned Nuctech. You mentioned Huawei. I wonder if you could speak about Dahua and Hikvision. The reason I mention these two companies is that we found out last year that the Canadian pension fund was invested in those companies.

Is it your information that those companies, as well, are involved in Xinjiang?

[Adrian Zenz]

I have not conducted as extensive research on this topic as a number of companies, such as ASPI, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, did last year. I specifically have information on Huawei and Nuctech. Also, the IPVM has published on this, on Hikvision specifically. Hikvision was clearly receiving public security tenders in Xinjiang. Hikvision is strongly implicated.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you very much.

In the minute I have left, are there any other witnesses who want to weigh in specifically on this issue of Chinese state-owned companies or other companies that are involved in Xinjiang and the relationship between the Canadian government and those companies?

[Dr. Raziya Mahmut]

Yes. Recently, on hair products specifically, for example, the U.S. border agency stopped certain types of products probably made with hair from detainees in concentration camps, female detainees. These products come from East Turkestan, so there is a big possibility that these hair products are made with hair from Uighurs or other Turkic people who are detained. Usually, once they have locked up people, they shave them from time to time, regularly. They all shaved their—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

We'll be moving to Ms. Vandenbeld for seven minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank all of our witnesses today for incredibly compelling and very timely testimony on a topic that, as you know, this committee has done previous work on. We did do a study. It was in the fall of 2018. At that time, I think it was probably some of the most disturbing testimony I had heard.

At that time, there wasn't very much in the public domain. A lot of what we heard was second-hand. There was a tremendous desire by the authorities in Xinjiang to make sure that information was not getting out internationally. Today we have first-hand testimonies, and we have studies like that of Dr. Zenz, which are documenting things in a much more concrete way.

I would be very interested in hearing the witnesses talk a little bit about what has happened since December 2018, since our study. I know that in January of 2019 when we published the summary of evidence, the very next day China did allow UN observers into the camps. My understanding is, of course, that a lot of that was very staged. Could you comment on both what has happened there and what has happened in terms of some of the international observers and what they have documented?

In particular, I will start with you, Dr. Zenz. Your testimony on the sterilization was so chilling. Perhaps you could talk about how much of that we have documented and where it is moving and how much has shifted since 2018.