Mr. Speaker, prior to the shutdown of Parliament, the Subcommittee on International Human Rights conducted two days of hearings into the human rights situation of Uighur Muslims in China. Your predecessor, Mr. Speaker, has granted emergency debates in the past in response to similar acts of unfolding mass violence, especially when those acts of violence may cross the threshold into genocide.
Three years ago, we had an emergency debate in this place on the Rohingya genocide, which eventually led to an official declaration by Parliament that those events constituted genocide according to the legal definition. The unfolding crisis invites you, Mr. Speaker, to follow that precedent and help us move forward, because the lives and security of an entire people are at stake.
The situation facing Uighurs is similar to that facing the Rohingya, although it is in certain respects even more terrifying. We see a clear and intentional effort by a permanent member of the UN Security Council to eradicate a people and a culture from the face of the earth, using the most sophisticated technology on offer and in the meantime enslaving those same people and selling us the products of their labour.
Experts at the subcommittee called this the largest mass detention of a minority community since the Holocaust. The world has seen the evidence: the photos of people loaded onto trains and the scars of the victims. The subcommittee heard from victims, women who were witness to the systematic sexual violence, forced abortion, forced sterilization and forced insertion of IUDs as part of an orchestrated strategy to prevent the continuing existence of the Uighur people. This is happening as we speak. New reports today in the New York Times show the intentional destruction of mosques and many other important religious sites.
For the moment, I will leave the final word to the great former parliamentarian, former justice minister, Irwin Cotler, who told the subcommittee:
When I was minister of justice back in 2005, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the responsibility to protect doctrine. That doctrine says, simply put, that if in any country we are witnessing war crimes, crimes against humanity and, God forbid, the unthinkable, namely genocide, and the government in that country is unwilling or unable to act or, worse, is the author of those crimes against humanity, if not genocide, then there is a responsibility on behalf of the international community to intervene and act to prevent, to punish and to sanction those war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. What we have here with respect to the Uighurs is a classic case study of such war crimes, crimes against humanity and, as I and others have mentioned, acts that are constitutive of genocide. That warrants our involvement, under the responsibility to protect doctrine, to initiate, undertake and implement the panoply of remedies that were heretofore recommended before your committee, some of which I recommended in my testimony, this being part of the responsibility to protect doctrine.