After the European Union announced formal sanctions against Chinese officials and entities for human rights violations on March 22, the UK followed suit, marking another sanction against the Chinese Communist Party since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. Our approach is to join our international partners in condemning these flagrant human rights violations,” Raab said in Parliament.
The Guardian commented that both the EU and the UK have crossed the political rubicon by imposing sanctions on senior Communist Party officials for the mass persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab noted in a video address to the UN Human Rights Council on February 22 that torture, forced labor, and forced birth control are all occurring on an “industrial scale” in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. He said that what is happening in Xinjiang is beyond what people can imagine.
In London, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced sanctions, imposing asset freezes and travel bans on four Chinese Communist government officials and a Xinjiang entity. This is the first Time the UK has acted within the framework of its own Global Human Rights sanctions.
Like the EU, the UK sanctions were imposed on Chen Mingguo, head of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s Public Security Department, Wang Mingshan and Wang Junzheng, senior Communist Party officials, and Zhu Hailun, former deputy party secretary of the XUAR. The sanctioned entities are the Public Security Bureau of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.
Raab said evidence of widespread human rights violations in Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party cannot be ignored, including reports of mass detention, surveillance, torture and forced sterilization of people in Xinjiang.
The British Foreign Office statement reads that the sanctions are part of collective action by the U.K., U.S., Canada and the European Union, and that there is now an international trend of a growing number of countries condemning the CCP’s human rights record, with 39 countries, for example, signing a joint statement to that effect at the United Nations.
Last week, the United States imposed sanctions on 24 Chinese Communist Party officials linked to violations of democracy in Hong Kong.
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