Canada: Uyghur victims narrate about Chinese atrocities to House of Commons

At a review meeting of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development at the House of Common of Canada, the members were joined by Uyghur victims via video conferencing, who exposed China’s worst atrocities on them, ANI reported.

Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C. was quoted as saying by ANI, “Since 2017, up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minority groups in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang have been strapped up probably largest incarceration of an ethnic-religious minority since the holocaust”. 

Kamila Talendibaevai, whose husband Huseyincan Celil, a Canadian citizen, was sentenced to life in a Chinese prison for founding a political party to work on behalf of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province in 2006,  joined the video conference and said: "Since 2006, I don’t have any communication with him. It’s been 14 years now. He doesn’t even have consular access and we are in regular touch with the Canadian embassy in China.”

Saygagul Sauytbay, another Uyghur witness who was forcibly put in a concentration camp in Xinjiang also joined via video conference, was quoted as saying by the news agency: "In the concentration camp where I was imprisoned there were about 2500 people and all of them were innocent people, who were sent to those concentration camps with fake claims. The age range of people imprisoned was between 13 to 18 years old.”

China has been criticized for reportedly holding up to one million ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in "re-education camps" under the pretext of fighting terrorism and religious extremism as of last summer.

Beijing has denied the existence of "re-education camps" on numerous occasions, insisting that the country is fully complying with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.