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Save Uyghur Campaign Welcomes the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s Report on Uyghur Forced Labor, Demands Release of Full Report

Save Uyghur Campaign welcomes the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report on Contemporary Forms of Slavery which confirms that Uyghur, Kazak, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people in East Turkestan (aka: Xinjiang Autonomous Region) have been being used as forced labor involuntarily for state sponsored political purposes by the Chinese government.

According to this report, the main causes of contemporary forms of slavery in East Turkestan are “chattel slavery; forced and bonded labor; domestic servitude; sexual slavery; child and forced marriage; and child labor.”

According to Adrian Zenz, the senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, this report was released shortly after China’s ratification of two ILO conventions against forced labor. These two ILO conventions are Forced Labor Convention, 1930 (No. 29) and the abolition of Forced Labor convention, 1957 (No. 105). For this reason, the timing of the release of this report is very delicate and serves to pressure China on the forced Uyghur labor issue.

Regarding this 20 page long U.N.report, Serwi Huseyin, team-lead of our Save Uyghur Campaign said, “We recognize this report which focuses on Uyghur forced labor as one positive step that the U.N. has made under global pressure which demands U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachellet release a long-delayed report on the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity and genocidal campaign in the Chinese occupied East Turkestan.” She also stated, “This report is good, but the world is waiting for the full report. Tomoya Obokata’s report only highlights China’s slave labor program which it is undertaking under the guise of fake poverty allievation policy, and it’s only one facet of the current genocide.”

Though the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Lithuania and several other countries have declared China’s mass detaintment and other crimes against humanity committed on Uyghurs as genocide, U.N. member states have failed to pressure Beijing to address the ongoing crisis in East Turkestan.

While welcoming the release of today’s UN report, Our Save Uyghur team urges the UN to release the full version of Bachelet’s long-awaited report on East Turkestan as this report might push U.N. member states to take meaningful actions to stop the Uyghur genocide in the near future.

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