The United States on Thursday imposed sanctions on Chinese officials, including a member of the country's powerful Politburo, accusing them of serious human rights abuses targeting the Uighur Muslim minority.
"The United States calls upon the world to stand against the CCP’s acts against its own minority communities in Xinjiang, including mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, religious persecution, and forced birth control and sterilization," a White House official said.
The sanctions are imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act, a federal law that allows the US government to target human rights violators around the world with freezes on any US assets, US travel bans and prohibitions on Americans doing business with them.
The sanctions were imposed on Chen, a member of China's powerful politburo; Zhu Hailun, a former deputy party secretary of the region; Wang Mingshan, the director and Communist Party secretary of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau; and former party secretary of the bureau Huo Liujun.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement said he was also imposing further visa restrictions on Chen, Zhu, and Wang, barring them and their immediate family from the United States.
The US Treasury Department said that Chen, the highest-ranking Chinese official to be hit with sanctions, implemented "a comprehensive surveillance, detention, and indoctrination program in Xinjiang, targeting Uighurs and other ethnic minorities" through the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau.
The United Nations estimates that more than a million Muslims have been detained in the Xinjiang region's camps, where they are subjected to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language and physically abused.
China says Xinjiang has long been its territory and claims it is bringing prosperity and development to the vast, resource-rich region. Many among Xinjiang’s native ethnic groups say they are being denied economic options in favor of migrants from elsewhere in China and that their Muslim faith and unique culture and language are being gradually eradicated.
Last December, Xinjiang authorities announced that the camps had closed and all the detainees had “graduated,” a claim difficult to corroborate independently given tight surveillance and restrictions on reporting in the region. Some Uighurs and Kazakhs have told the AP that their relatives have been released, but many others say their loved ones remain in detention, were sentenced to prison or transferred to forced labor in factories.
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