New Delhi (NVI): The US sanctioned a top member of China’s Communist Party along with three other senior officials and a Chinese entity involved in systematic human rights abuses of Muslim minorities and ethnic Kazakhs in China’s western province of Xinjiang.
“The United States is committed to using the full breadth of its financial powers to hold human rights abusers accountable in Xinjiang and across the world,” said Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, according to a release by US Department of Treasury.
The Trump administration has likened China’s mass detention of more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang to the worst human rights abuses since the 1930s, when 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
The sanctions against Chinese officials were levied under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which was passed in 2016 and gives the United States the ability to impose human rights penalties on foreign officials.
The targets of the sanctions included Chen Quanguo — a member of China’s 25-member ruling Politburo and party secretary of the Xinjiang region.
Other officials penalized include Zhu Hailun, a former deputy party secretary for the region; Wang Mingshan, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau; and Huo Liujun, a former party secretary of the bureau. The bureau also faces sanctions.
The Treasury Department’s statement on Thursday cited the public security bureau’s use of “repressive tactics,” including “mass detentions and surveillance” against the region’s Uighur population.
Since at least late 2016, repressive tactics have been used by the XPSB against the Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups in the region, including mass detentions and surveillance.
Targets of People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) surveillance are often detained and reportedly subjected to various methods of torture and “political reeducation.” According to press reporting, since at least 2017, more than one million Muslims have been held in these camps.
“The entity and officials are being designated for their connection to serious human rights abuse against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, which reportedly include mass arbitrary detention and severe physical abuse, among other serious abuses targeting Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim population indigenous to Xinjiang, and other ethnic minorities in the region,” according to the statement.
-CHK
