The U.S. State Department released its 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights on Tuesday (March 30), detailing the human rights situation in nearly 200 countries, including China and Russia. For the first Time, the annual human rights report explicitly states that genocide and Crimes Against Humanity have been committed in Xinjiang.
In the China section of the report, the U.S. State Department mentions that Chinese authorities let four citizen journalists who covered the initial Wuhan outbreak disappear. Chinese scholars who deviated from the official outbreak narrative were harassed and censored for their speech, in some cases by university and police interference.
The report, released this year, is even more harshly worded in its description of Beijing‘s massive Xinjiang detention camp program. The report explicitly states, “Genocide and crimes against humanity have been committed in Xinjiang against the predominantly Muslim Uighur and other ethnic and religious minorities.”
Pompeo, the Trump administration’s secretary of state, characterized China’s practices in Xinjiang as genocide before he left office. China vehemently denies it. Blinken said in January that he agreed with his predecessor Pompeo’s characterization.
The report said that in addition to sending “more than one million” Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups to what it called extrajudicial detention camps, “another two million were trained in daytime only ‘re-Education‘ programs “. Previous annual reports had not previously included this.
U.S. Secretary of State John Blinken said at a news conference Tuesday that there has been a regression in human rights around the world.
He said, “The report released today shows that human rights trends continue to move in the wrong direction, and we’re seeing evidence of that happening in all regions of the world. We have seen acts of genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uighurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang; attacks on and imprisonment of opposition politicians, anti-corruption activists, independent media workers in countries such as Russia, Uganda and Venezuela, and arbitrary arrests, beatings and other violence against protesters in Belarus .”
Blinken also spoke about the atrocities taking place in Yemen and the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
He also mentioned the latest situation in Burma. He said, “Non-violent protesters in Burma have been killed, beaten and imprisoned, including more than 100 reportedly killed by the military on Saturday, and many of the dead were participating in protests on Military Day, while some were simply bystanders.”
Blinken said some governments are using the new Epidemic crisis “as an excuse to restrict people’s rights and consolidate authoritarian rule.”
One way to stop human rights abuses and hold violators accountable is for the administration to work with Congress to pass laws to punish violators, including the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the Hong Kong Bill of Rights and Democracy, Blinken said.
Another way is to impose consequences through economic sanctions and visa restrictions, and just as the United States recently acted jointly with Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom to sanction individuals who committed atrocities against the Uighurs and Xinjiang, we will find ways to incentivize countries to take positive steps toward respect for human rights through trade benefits and development assistance, among other things,” he added. “
Secretary Blinken acknowledged that the United States also has work to do domestically in the area of human rights, including fighting systemic racism. But unlike authoritarian states, he said, the United States will address these challenges openly.
The State Department is required by law to submit annual country-by-country human rights reports to Congress for lawmakers to consider when considering legislation, approving foreign aid and for some other decisions.
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