The Chinese government admitted last October that there were so-called rehabilitation and training centers for Uighur minority detainees in various parts of east China’s Xinjiang Province. This official recognition comes a year after the construction of these detention centres, which holds between one million and two million people belonging to the Muslim minority of Uyghur without charge, without judicial verdict and without any legal basis.
According to the information we have obtained, these Chinese citizens are detained solely because they surf websites and communicate by phone with their families living abroad or because they perform their Islamic religious duties.
They are also being subjected to indoctrination and brainwashed into mass detention centers to force them to renounce their religious and cultural values.
AFD International would like to remind the Chinese government of a very important human rights documents which aims to protect the rights of minorities around the world namely “theDeclaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities”. Especially, Article 2 (1)which states that:
“Persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities (hereinafter referred to as persons belonging to minorities) have the right to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, and to use their own language, in private and in public, freely and without interference or any form of discrimination”.
We at AFD international strongly condemn these inhumane practices and illegal detention of such a large number of citizens in mass detention centres without any legal justification. We also call on the UN Special Rapporteurs to exercise some pressure on the Chinese government in order to stop these practices, which remind us of the detention centers of the Second World War, which we thought was a distant past.
AFD International
Department of Asia and the Pacific
25/11/2018