Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced new visa restrictions on members of the Chinese communist government Tuesday afternoon, citing long standing and vast human rights abuses.
China has forcibly detained over one million Muslims in a brutal, systematic campaign to erase religion and culture in Xinjiang. China must end its draconian surveillance and repression, release all those arbitrarily detained, and cease its coercion of Chinese Muslims abroad.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) October 8, 2019
Today, I am announcing visa restrictions on Chinese government and Communist Party officials believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, the detention or abuse of Uighurs, Kazakhs, or other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) October 8, 2019
China has detained at least one million Uighurs in recent years and has put them in re-education camps.
Government officials are also harvesting their organs. From NBC:
The organs of members of marginalized groups detained in Chinese prison camps are being forcefully harvested — sometimes when patients are still alive, an international tribunal sitting in London has concluded.
Some of the more than 1.5 million detainees in Chinese prison camps are being killed for their organs to serve a booming transplant trade that is worth some $1 billion a year, concluded the China Tribunal, an independent body tasked with investigating organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in the authoritarian state.
“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” the tribunal concluded in its final judgment Monday. The practice is “of unmatched wickedness — on a death for death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century,” it added.
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The Trump administration has been putting pressure on China to stop its persecution of minority and religious groups. Over the summer, Pompeo held the second annual religious freedom ministerial at the State Department and directly called out the communist country.
“In China, the Chinese Communist Party demands control over the lives of the Chinese people and their souls. Chinese Government officials have even discouraged other countries from attending this very gathering. Is that consistent with the guarantee of ‘freedom of religious belief’ that is found directly in the Chinese constitution? If you’re here today and you’re a country which has defied the Chinese pressure to come here, we salute you and we thank you," Pompeo said. "Since April 2017, the Chinese Government has detained more than one million Chinese Muslims and other minorities in camps in Xinjiang. With us today is Jewher Ilham – a courageous woman – a courageous woman who has fought the release – for the release of her father. He was given an unprecedented life sentence for his writings dedicated to bridging the gap between the Uighur people and the Han Chinese, a noble undertaking."
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