Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on July 21st, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number five 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, today is the second meeting of the subcommittee on its study of the human rights situation of the Uighurs.

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

Interpretation in this video conference will work very much as in regular committee meetings. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of “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 might want to allow for a short pause when switching languages.

When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute. Should any technical challenges arise, such as in relation to interpretation or a problem with your audio, please advise the chair immediately and the technical team will work to resolve the problem.

Before we begin, we would like to emphasize our focus on Uighurs. Several of our witnesses we've heard from are experts in human rights in general, and some will be here 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, so to reiterate, the focus is on Uighurs.

I commend all our witnesses from yesterday's meeting. They were truly amazing. We had experts, we had advocates, we had academics. We had personal stories of courage and bravery. We thank them for coming forward.

I now welcome today's witnesses. For this panel, we have from the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, the head, William Browder; as an individual, Olga Alexeeva, sinologist and professor of contemporary Chinese history, from the Université du Québec at Montreal; Azeezah Kanji, legal academic and journalist; and Errol Mendes, professor of law and president of the International Commission of Jurists Canada.

Clerk, I believe that is the order in which we will be going.

Mr. Browder, you will start off. You will have six minutes to address us with your opening statement and then we'll move to members' questions.

You may begin.

[William Browder, Head, Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign]

Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for giving me this opportunity to address you today on the shocking persecution of the Uighur minority in China.

I come to this from a slightly different angle than other people on the panel and other people who have testified. Some of you may know me. For many years I've been coming to Ottawa to advocate to pass the Magnitsky act in Canada. My background is that I was in Russia for many years. Sergei Magnitsky was my lawyer. He uncovered a massive case of corruption, exposed it, and was, in retaliation, arrested, tortured and killed. I came up with this idea of the Magnitsky act, which would freeze the assets and ban the visas.

I came first to the United States, and they passed the Magnitsky act in 2012. I then came to Canada. Canada passed the Magnitsky act in 2017. Now, in total, there are seven countries with Magnitsky acts.

The Magnitsky act is quite a powerful tool in dealing with human rights abuse. It used to be that 40 years ago people like the Khmer Rouge didn't go on vacation to Saint-Tropez, but now you have people from all these different countries who commit human rights abuses travelling to foreign countries, buying property, doing all sorts of things. It becomes a way of creating consequences in a situation where the world didn't have consequences before.

As a result of this, I have been approached in numerous countries by numerous people about numerous issues. About two and a half years ago, I was in Washington, D.C., working on implementing getting more people sanctioned under the Magnitsky act. I was asked by a U.S. official who was involved in the Uighur situation if I could spend half an hour meeting with a member of the Uighur community who this person thought I should meet. I agreed to the meeting and ended up meeting a woman named Gulchehra Hoja.

Gulchehra is a Uighur. She lives in Washington, D.C., and she works for an organization called Radio Free Asia, which is a U.S.-funded media organization that reports on things going on in Asia without any interference from the Chinese government. She works on the Uighur language service. Gulchehra sat down with me and she told me her story. It was quite remarkable. She was the first person to be able to interview somebody coming out of the Uighur concentration camps. She interviewed a woman who had come out of a camp and told the story of what had happened. In retaliation for telling that story, 25 members of her family were arrested in China and put into these concentration camps.

Hearing that story, I didn't know anything about these concentration camps before, and so I started to work with her to hear what was going on and get more information. As I'm sure many members of the panel will present today, I learned about the forced sterilization of women. I learned about the way in which literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people were being arrested. I learned about the forced separation of children from their families. It's become obvious to me that this is probably the most significant human rights issue that we currently face in the world.

In addition to my personal contact with Gulchehra, I'm a descendent of a Holocaust refugee. My mother had to flee Vienna during the Holocaust. To see that we have a genocide that is effectively taking place right before our eyes when we all said, “never again”, I feel compelled to do what I can for the Uighur people, and for Gulchehra and other victims.

The one thing we can do again, or we can do in this situation, is apply Magnitsky sanctions on the officials in China who are perpetrating this abuse. This is exactly why the Magnitsky act was created. The United States has imposed sanctions using the Magnitsky act on four Chinese officials, including a member of the politburo, and I'm scratching my head and wondering why Canada, which has the Magnitsky act specifically for this purpose, doesn't apply those sanctions right now.

I'm here today to strongly advocate for Canada to join the United States in sanctioning the Chinese officials responsible for this and hopefully expand that sanctions list so that many more people in China who are perpetrating this genocide are held responsible.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Browder.

Now we're going to move to Olga Alexeeva for six minutes for her opening statement.

Olga.

[Olga Alexeeva, Sinologist and Professor of Contemporary Chinese History, Université du Quebec à Montreal, As an Individual]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today about the political context surrounding the repression of Uighurs in China.

As you know, since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been detained in so-called re-education centres, which the Chinese authorities claim is intended to combat Muslim extremism. In fact, the opening of these camps is only the latest in a very long series of repressive measures adopted by the Chinese government against Uighurs.

The autonomous region of Xinjiang, where the majority of Uighurs live, was only integrated into the Chinese space in the 19th century. Since that time, the Uighurs have been fighting against Chinese assimilation practises, and this struggle is today led by multiple independence movements, violent or not, based on various ideologies, notably “Pan-Turkism,” the movement for democracy and radical Islamism. They all share the same objective: to establish an independent Uighur state in Xinjiang.

Xinjiang has therefore always been a control challenge for Beijing, but since the 1990s, the Uighurs' struggle for independence has intensified. Many factors explain these developments. As a historian, I could go on for hours explaining them to you, but I think the main reason is that the Uighurs now feel marginalized on their own territory. More and more Chinese migrants are now coming to Xinjiang. They are monopolizing arable land and water resources and taking advantage of government aid to set up businesses, while the Uighurs are getting poorer.

The Chinese also predominate in local government. The feeling of being dominated by China for the benefit of the Chinese and at their expense has generated, as you can imagine, a very deep sense of unease among the Uighurs. This frustration has quickly turned into protest, which is normal, and it takes different forms in Xinjiang, from bombings and spontaneous riots to student demonstrations and peaceful activism by Uighur activists who have fled abroad.

Nevertheless, Beijing qualifies all these actions as terrorist acts inspired by the international Islamist movement. According to Beijing, the existence of some Uighur Jihadist groupings with links to al-Qaeda thus legitimizes the intensification of repression in Xinjiang. This hardening is reflected in thousands of arrests and the trivialization of torture and ill-treatment of Uighur prisoners.

In response, as you may know, a new wave of deadly attacks occurred in China in 2013 and 2014. These attacks, in particular the attack on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, have had a thunderbolt effect among the Chinese leadership, who now see the Uighur problem as a threat to national stability. In their view, this justifies the authoritarian takeover of the entire Uighur population and no longer just militants, sympathizers or people whom they describe as terrorists.

Starting in 2014, the number of Chinese law enforcement personnel patrolling Xinjiang territory has been increased. There are now more than 100,000 Chinese law enforcement personnel. Cameras with facial and voice recognition tools have been installed throughout the country to track people and vehicles everywhere, including in rural areas. Biometric data collection, including DNA, has also been initiated for the entire Uighur population. It is understood that these surveillance measures are extremely intrusive. The problem is that they are also accompanied by arbitrary arrests, house searches, confiscation of passports and bans on certain religious practices. At the same time, more than 20 internment camps have also been opened throughout the Xinjiang region. The criteria for sending people to these camps are arbitrary and unclear.

It is enough to possess an unapproved edition of the Koran, to abstain from drinking alcohol, to do Ramadan or to travel too often to Turkey or Egypt to find oneself in one of these camps for an indefinite period of time. Indeed, the legal procedures are also very opaque.

The Uighurs are now subjected to repressive practices. They have been victimized for decades, but the scale of the current repression is unprecedented. More than 1 million Uighurs, or 10% of the population, are now being held in camps in Xinjiang. In Beijing’s view, this strategic region, which is rich in natural resources, would be an inalienable part of the country’s territory. It is inconceivable for Beijing to renounce it or to grant its people any kind of autonomy. It must also be said that the instability in Xinjiang poses risks to the Chinese project. As is well known, the New Silk Road is very dear to Xi Jinping’s heart.

This very serious, very tense and very particular political context places Uighurs in an impasse. It feeds the breeding ground for resentment and hatred towards the authorities in Beijing and the Chinese in general. In my opinion, the harshness of the repression could only push young activists, frustrated by this incredible injustice, to opt for a more violent approach. Therefore, one can only imagine that, in the long term, this policy may lead to conflict.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Ms. Alexeeva. You will have an opportunity to elaborate during the question period.

We'll now move to Errol Mendes for six minutes.

[Errol P. Mendes, Professor of Law and President, International Commission of Jurists Canada]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you for the invitation.

We are witnessing in Xinjiang, China, what we had hoped would never happen again after the Second World War. I'm talking about the detention of over a million Uighurs. This is an ethnic and religious group on whom we are witnessing enforced birth control efforts by the Chinese government to reduce the numbers of this group. While the Chinese claim that these are vocational and training camps, there are credible reports that these camps include enforced propaganda sessions, forced labour and physical abuse, and some are alleging even deaths.

There is no one who is excluded. I want to give you an example of a leading Muslim female professor who I had gotten to know during my many years of doing research in China. Gulazat Tursun is a professor of law and was a supervisor of Ph.D. students at Sichuan University. She was one of the well-known international academics focusing on human rights. She was a visitor at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at Harvard University and Denmark's Danish Institute for Human Rights. Despite these credentials, she was basically detained in one of those camps, and to this day we are not certain whether she has been released or not.

Others have had an even worse fate. One academic may be facing the ultimate fate. Dr. Tashpolat Tiyip, a renowned scholar of geography and a former president of Xinjiang University, was suspected of being at risk of execution as he faced the end of a two-year reprieve of his death sentence, according to the Scholars at Risk Network in September of 2019. We haven't heard about his fate either.

I agree with my friend, former justice minister Irwin Cotler, that we should join the U.S. and other countries who have imposed targeted sanctions against the key figures in Xinjiang who are the major planners for the mass detention. I have suggested that the Magnitsky sanctions should target the architects of the detention, and I give names. I suggest the governor of Xinjiang, Shohrat Zakir and the region's party chief, Chen Quanguo, who is a member of the politburo of the party at the highest ranks of the Chinese government.

There are others, but these two, I think, are the chief planners of the detention. Both have asserted that these allegations of what amount to serious international crimes, which I would like to talk about, against the Uighurs are fabricated lies and absurd. In fact, Zakir goes even further by describing the camps as boarding schools where the rights of the students are protected.

In 2017, Parliament passed the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, which implements the Magnitsky sanctions and which targets specific officials in terms of freezes and travel bans and also freezes their assets. Similar laws, as my friend Bill Browder has said, have been adopted by the U.S and other European countries. Now the European Union, thanks to his championship, has also considered expanding the Magnitsky sanctions across the European Union.

As is known, Bill was one of the major champions for this provision because his own lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was murdered by Russian officials. I had the privilege of assisting in a minor way in having Bill come up to Canada and promote the adoption of the Magnitsky law here in Canada.

I would like to briefly address the views of another legal colleague who is also the next ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, he stated that the Canadian government must consider the consequences of imposing sanctions on senior government officials for human rights violations against minority groups.

While I agree with him that a government can never afford to engage in non-consequential thinking and non-consequential acting, he seemed to imply that could include any actions involving our two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, and further trade actions on our agricultural and lumber products. However, Canada cannot bend its foundational commitments as a society to the rule of law. That is the antithesis of what's happening in Xinjiang. We cannot abandon our often-stated commitments to the promotion and protection of universal human rights embodied in our promise of “never again”. We cannot be seen to be bystanders to the latest, yet again, serious international crimes that come within the definition of crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and genocide.

We cannot stay silent or inactive in the face of these atrocities or we forfeit our right to be regarded as champions of equal human dignity and the rights of all peoples on the world stage. History has shown that silence is the complicit partner to genocide.

Canada cannot be silent or inactive against what I consider to be mounting crimes against humanity, including genocidal acts against the Uighurs. I consider that the actions of the Chinese government amount to crimes against humanity and genocidal acts, especially as they continue in terms of forced birth control acts against the Uighurs.

Now, the officials who I suggest should be targets for these Magnitsky sanctions may not have any frozen assets here in Canada, or may not even want to travel here in Canada, but the signal we send with the targeted sanctions, to not just China but the entire world, is that we are acting on behalf of humanity. We hope our traditional allies will follow suit and perhaps even consider joining us.

Regarding the threat of possible punishing consequences from China, given that we are already facing such actions with the detention of two Canadians as a consequence of the Meng Wanzhou extradition proceedings, I suggest that we must develop a longer-term strategy and policy on China that addresses both the hostage diplomacy actions and some of the other consequences we are facing in terms of trade sanctions, etc., which I think violate world trade rules. I think Canada and its government must develop a longer-term strategy with our traditional democratic allies and hopefully a future U.S. administration that puts in place economic, social and multilateral deterrents to not only the use of hostage diplomacy but also the ability of China to target democratic countries that are bound by their values, principles and constitutions to adhere to the rule of law.

This could include common approaches to make Chinese global companies subject to national security, human rights and anti-corruption scrutiny, and penalize them for complicity in their state's actions amounting to the most serious international crimes. Given the reports that are coming out of Xinjiang, I think some of the brands that are being made by forced labour and finding their way up to the U.S. and Canada should be one of the key actions that this committee, and in fact the larger committee, should be looking at to deal with those forced labour products. In fact, under the recent CUSMA, the trade agreement with the U.S. and Mexico, there is a prohibition.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you for your opening statement, Mr. Mendes.

Ms. Kanji, you have six minutes for your opening statement.

[Azeezah Kanji, Legal Academic and Journalist, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

Official documents prescribing mass forced sterilization and mass surveillance; satellite imagery documenting the destruction of ancient cultural sites and the proliferation of concentration camps; drone footage showing men, heads shorn, shackled and blindfolded, being herded onto trains—these are just some of the glimpses we've had of China's practices in the Uighur homeland of East Turkestan, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, despite the cone of secrecy China has placed around it. We don't even know for sure exactly how many hundreds of thousands—millions—of Uighurs have been incarcerated in what is suspected to be the largest regime of minority internment since the Nazi Holocaust.

China's infamous network of concentration camps is just one node of a far more extensive project. It's extensive spatially, with the intensive surveillance state penetrating into Uighur villages, homes, bedrooms, cellphones and even DNA through mass biometric collection, even reaching abroad to target Uighurs living in Canada and elsewhere. It's also extensive temporally, with this just the latest stage in what academics have analyzed as China's decades-long, if not centuries-long, project of settler colonization and deliberate demographic change in the resource rich territory China refers to as Xinjiang, meaning literally “new frontier”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I'm sorry to interrupt, Ms. Kanji. I'm wondering if you could slow down a little bit for our interpreters and move your microphone away from your mouth a little bit. It's popping a little.

[Azeezah Kanji]

Is this okay now?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

They say yes.

As well, just slow down a little bit.

Thank you. We'll add time to your statement.

[Azeezah Kanji]

The concentration camps are just one note in a project that is both more spatially and temporally extensive, temporally with just the latest stage in what academics have analyzed as China's decades-long, if not centuries-long, project of settler colonization and deliberate demographic change in the resource rich territory China refers to as Xinjiang, literally meaning “new frontier”.

The renowned scholar of colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, famously said, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.” In the case of China's policies against the Uighurs, this question of genocide is not just abstract or metaphorical but imminent and literal.

In the UN genocide convention, as well as in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, genocide is defined as any one of the five following acts: one, killing; two, causing serious bodily or mental harm; three, infliction of conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction; four, imposition of measures intended to prevent births; or, five, forcible transfer of children. Any one of these listed acts, when conducted with an intention to destroy a people as a people, “in whole or in part”, qualifies as genocide when committed with the requisite genocidal intent.

In the case of the Uighurs, however, there is evidence of all five categories of genocidal acts having been committed, with reports of deaths in concentration camps; tortures, such as electrocution and waterboarding; forced starvation and exposure to diseases, including the coronavirus, in concentration and forced labour camps; a sterilization campaign, in which 80% of new intrauterine birth control devices in China were installed in Xinjiang, which constitutes less than 2% of the Chinese population; and, the separation of almost half a million children from their families and communities.

As for the question of intent, when officials describe Islam as an “ideological virus”, an “incurable malignant tumour”, and a “weed” infecting the “crops”, efforts at eradication are the logical extension.

Testifying to the seriousness of the crime, the genocide convention includes not simply an obligation to punish genocide after the fact, but an obligation on all states to prevent genocide. According to the International Court of Justice “a State's obligation to prevent [genocide], and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of...the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed.” That threshold of serious risk has surely long been passed.

In 2014, the UN office on genocide prevention released a framework for identifying warning signs of genocide and other atrocity crimes. Virtually all of those signs are present in Xinjiang.

Having also worked on advocacy regarding the Rohingya genocide, which is now before both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, I saw how long states avoided recognizing that situation as genocidal or proto-genocidal in order to avoid triggering their duty to prevent, as states previously refused to recognize the Rwanda genocide even as it was unfolding in the sight of the eyes of the entire world in 1994.

Even in the face of compelling evidence, the capacity for denialism is great, as are the shame, repentance and horror in hindsight when “never again” is permitted to occur again and again.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you for your remarks, and thank you for accommodating and for your patience with the interpretation and the mike.

Now we're going to open it up to questions. Each member will have seven minutes during this round.

We'll start with Mr. Sweet.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you for the opportunity.

Mr. Browder, I want to thank you very much for all your great work. You've appeared before this committee on a number of occasions. You are the great example of a businessperson with a conscience, pursuing legal recourse for a friend, a lawyer from your firm who was tortured and murdered, as you said. I want to express my gratitude for all the work you did to ensure that countries like ours have a Magnitsky act, not only in a memorial to Sergei but also to make sure we can correct any other human rights violations.

Mr. Mendes, Ms. Kanji has just laid out the case very articulately for the threshold that's been met in regard to genocide. Obviously, our committee will be making a statement after all this testimony, and a report. In your opinion, with your jurisprudence experience, do the actions of the Chinese Communist Party meet the threshold of genocide?

[Errol P. Mendes]

In my view, they do.

As Ms. Kanji rightly stated, one of the biggest challenges, if this were to go to court, would be on what's called the specific intent—the intent, either in whole or in part, to eliminate a group. In my view, that's where China will try to make its defence: “Well, prove it.” Ms. Kanji quite rightly came up with certain types of evidentiary evidence that would be required to prove that intent.

The big problem I foresee, however, in terms of taking it to a court, is that China has not become a party to the International Criminal Court, and if we were to take it to the International Court of Justice, again, China would probably deny it has jurisdiction.

This is why I think it is very critical for Canada, first of all, to show its resolve by having the Magnitsky sanctions apply, but second, to work with allies, especially if we can have a future U.S. administration that is willing to work with all the democratic countries, to put together a democratic strategy to put more and more pressure, including private sector pressure, on China to stop its actions.

It's going to take a long time. It's going to be very complex, but we have to start, and start now.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

I want to ask you about the corollary of what you said. When no action is taken, when there's silence, how is that interpreted by regimes like the Chinese Communist Party?

[Errol P. Mendes]

I think Bill will remember this. One of the things history has asked us to keep in mind is that before Hitler decided to start the “final solution”, he kept saying, “After all, who remembers the Armenian genocide?” That was one of the reasons why he felt that if no one paid attention to the Armenian genocide, why not start another one?

This is why I think it is absolutely critical for us to show our conviction that we promised in that “never again” promise we made. That's one thing.

However, because I'm a realist, and knowing how powerful China is, we absolutely need our allies. We need the United States to work with all the democratic countries to confront this potential challenge, which is as great as anything we've faced in the 1930s, to come to grips with it. If we don't, I think we may have even bigger disasters on our doorstep shortly.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

This is a broad question, I know, but I want to pose it to you because of the nature of your testimony. Canada led a coalition of countries to put pressure on the South African regime to end apartheid. Do you feel that Canada could take that leadership role, with the right leadership, and bring countries together—Australia, New Zealand—and accomplish similar results with China in the long term?

[Errol P. Mendes]

Absolutely, and I think we could start with the United States. Vice-President Biden has said, as one of his promises, that after he gets elected, and hopefully he will, he is going to establish a democratic summit of all the democratic countries in the world to address some of these issues. I think Canada should be working right now with the potential next President of the United States to see how we can put together that strategy, because it will involve all the democratic countries in the world to take on this challenge front and centre. It requires very careful planning. It requires a lot of attention to how we deal with it.

Yes, there will be consequences. We're already facing that with the two Michaels. We're already facing that with the agricultural committees, and we may be facing more if we do the Magnitsky sanctions.

Where I part company with my friend Bob Rae is that we can't just focus on that. We have to look at what is going to happen if we ignore that, and what else may happen. There are potential world-shaking events that could happen. I can just refer you to one. After Hong Kong, what's next? Could it be Taiwan?

I think right now there should be a stronger world strategy of democratic countries to figure out how to deal with this growing threat to the entire world.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

I'm not certain whether it would be your expertise or Mr. Browder's, so whoever wants to chime in.... We have quite a sophisticated organization called FINTRAC. Over a trillion dollars left China in 2016 and, of course, it's laundered here in Canada. Do you think we have enough expertise to locate the money of these CCP members and fulfill the role and accomplish what is needed through the Magnitsky Act?

[William Browder]

Can I respond to that?

I have some experience with Canadian law enforcement in relation to money laundering investigations. In the Magnitsky case, we identified millions of dollars—from the crime that Sergei Magnitsky exposed and was killed over—coming to Canada. We filed a criminal complaint with the RCMP about five years ago, and it was quite compelling evidence. It was clear where the money went. We found real estate that was purchased with that money. The RCMP initially opened an investigation but never seized any of the property, and then quietly closed the investigation.

I would argue that this is probably one of the most well-packaged—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

[William Browder]

—formal complaints they could have ever received.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I'm sure you'll have an opportunity later.

We're moving on to Mr. Zuberi for seven minutes.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I want to thank all the experts for testifying and informing us at this committee with your testimony.

I'd like to put forth the first question to Mr. Mendes around the Magnitsky sanctions. You mentioned two names, but I'd like to get your opinion. On July 9, 2020, the U.S. Department of Treasury actually implemented these very sanctions on a number of individuals and one entity. I wanted your opinion on that. There's the Communist Party secretary of the Uighur autonomous region, Chen Quanguo. Another gentleman is Zhu Hailun, a former deputy secretary of the Uighur autonomous region. There's also Wang Mingshan, the XPSB, and another individual.

Mr. Mendes, what is your opinion on this, in terms of going that far? You only mentioned two initially.

I don't know if Mr. Browder would also like to contribute to that.