Press Releases

11/26/2019

Detention centers in China

human rights organization calls for sanctions against those who are responsible (Press Release)

If the EU is serious about trying to combat impunity all over the world, it must react to the China Cables revelations. Accordingly, the former Security Chief of the region of Xinjiang / East Turkestan, Zhu Hailun, his successor Wang Junzheng, and Xinjiang's Party Secretary Chen Quanguo should no longer be allowed to travel to Europe. Picture: Martin Schulz via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), the European Union should impose travel bans and financial sanctions on those who are responsible for the internment of members of the Muslim minority groups in northwestern China. "People who are responsible for crimes against humanity should not be allowed to enter the European Union. Europe must ensure that the serious human rights violations in China will not go unpunished," stated Ulrich Delius, the STP's director, in Göttingen on Tuesday. "If the EU is serious about trying to combat impunity all over the world, it must react to the China Cables revelations." Accordingly, the former Security Chief of the region of Xinjiang / East Turkestan, Zhu Hailun, his successor Wang Junzheng, and Xinjiang's Party Secretary Chen Quanguo should no longer be allowed to travel to Europe. According to the China Cables revelations, which were published on Sunday, these three people are significantly responsible for the persecution of members of the Muslim minorities in China.

Zhu Hailun is accused of developing the inhumane internment system. Zhu was chairman of the influential committee for legal and political issues of the Communist Party in the region. In 2017, he signed numerous documents in connection with the plans to build the re-education camps. Currently, around 1.5 million Muslim Uyghurs, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, and Hui are detained there. As the right-hand man of the regional party leader, he developed the camp system and established a regime of total surveillance in the region.

His successor Wang Junzheng is considered a hopeful newcomer among the junior staff of the Communist Party. The 56-year-old Han Chinese from the coastal province of Shandong was transferred to the northwest of the country in 2019 to improve the internment system. "He is trying to make a career in Beijing, and he wants to prove himself in Xinjiang by introducing even more repressive measures," Delius explained. Within the CP, he is widely seen as a very promising candidate.

"Party secretary Chen Quanguo has already left a trail of blood in Tibet, where he worked in the same role from 2011 to 2016," said Delius. Here, too, he declared the entire Tibetan population an enemy of China in order to systematically destroy their ethnic identity. Thus, more than one million nomads were forced to settle to make them depended on the state. In Xinjiang, he is continuing his policy. Thus, he sent tens of thousands of communist party cadres to visit Uyghur families and to spy on them. He categorically accused Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz people of promoting terrorism, and he aims to destroy important landmarks of their culture and religion. "Among the members of the Muslim nationalities, his actions awakened the worst memories of the terror of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s," Delius emphasized.

Header image: Martin Schulz via Flickr