The Uyghur Tribunal was an 'independent' 'people's tribunal' based in the United Kingdom. It aimed to examine evidence regarding the ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghur people by the Government of China and to evaluate whether these abuses constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention. The tribunal concluded that the Chinese government has committed genocide against the Uyghur people and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang. The tribunal is an unofficial body with no legal authority.
The Chinese government strongly denies the tribunal's findings and has criticized it as politically motivated. Commentators who studied the Tribunal in depth, such as Jaq James (see profile) observed that:
1. The Uyghur Tribunal was instigated by, and received its initial US$115,000 in funding from the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which James aptly describes as not a human rights group but rather “a secessionist organisation that views Xinjiang as being a separate country, called East Turkistan, occupied by the PRC government.”
2. None of the witnesses—including “expert” witnesses—appears to have given sworn testimony, such as by signing a statutory declaration in lieu of the official swearing in conducted by state courts and thus risked no legal consequences for lying. Nor were any of them cross-examined, not least because no defence counsel was appointed to represent the PRC—something which would delegitimise any trial at the best of times, let alone in a case such as this where, as James puts it, “some of the fact witnesses may have been supporters for seceding Xinjiang from China and some of the expert witnesses’ ideological opposition to communism and the ruling Communist Party of China may have induced a ‘means justifies the ends’ calculation to exaggerate or misrepresent human rights abuse claims against the PRC government.”
James points out that the “expert” witnesses included such luminaries as Australian Strategic Policy Institute satellite image analyst Nathan Ruser, whom James and others have previously exposed as having misrepresented shopping centres, schools and other public buildings across Xinjiang as Uyghur “internment camps”; and who at 22 years of age undoubtedly lacked the nine years’ relevant experience that is the International Criminal Court’s minimum qualification to be called as an “expert” witness.
Another “expert” was Adrian Zenz of the US government-sponsored Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a fundamentalist Christian zealot who has publicly declared himself “led by God” on a “mission” against China, and whose testimony rehashed his long since debunked use of fraudulent statistical analysis to portray Chinese government family planning regulations (which apply throughout the PRC) and the use by Xinjiang women of intrauterine contraceptive devices as evidence of “genocide”.
See "The Uyghur Tribunal: People’s Justice or Show Trial?", https://www.cowestpro.co/cowestpro_3-2022.pdf
| Article Title |
|---|