UK sanctions Chinese officials over Uighur human rights abuses

Britain has joined the EU and the US in applying sanctions against four senior Chinese officials and one Chinese agency involved in human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The government this afternoon unveiled a raft of “Magnitsky-style” asset freezes and travel bans against the Chinese officials over their treatment of Uighur Muslims in the northwestern Chinese province.

Foreign secretary Dominic Raab said China’s treatment of Uighurs was “one of the worst human rights crises of our time” and “the largest mass detention of an ethnic or religious group since the second World War”.

A wide body of evidence has been collected by human rights groups and foreign governments of a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Uighur Muslims, which the US has labelled as genocide.

The evidence includes the mass internment of 1m Uighurs, forced sterilisation of women, religious persecution and the forceable removal of children from their parents.

“People are detained for having too may children, for praying too much, for having a beard or a head scarf – for having wrong thoughts,” Raab said.

“By acting with our partners, 30 of us in total, we are sending the clearest message to the Chinese government.

“The international community will not turn a blind eye to such serious and systematic violations of basic human rights.”

The sanctions will apply to Zhu Hailun, China’s former deputy party secretary in Xinjiang, senior Chinese officials Wang Mingshan and Wang Junzheng, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau and Chen Mingguo — the director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau. 

The Treasury said Chen “was responsible for serious violations of the right not to be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment that have taken place in so-called training centres” in Xinjiang.

It comes after the EU this morning announced its own sanctions against Chinese officials, sparking a dramatic retaliation from Beijing.

China immediately announced tit-for-tat asset freezes on 10 EU individuals, including European politicians, the EU’s main foreign policy decision-making body known as the Political and Security Committee and two leading think tanks.

China has denied any human rights abuses in Xinjiang and says its camps provide vocational training required to fight extremism in the country.

Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said the timing of the sanctions were “grubby and cynical” as they came on the same day the government is facing a Tory rebellion over an amendment that seeks to make it more difficult for the government to sign trade deals with genocidal governments.

“It is designed to send a signal not to the Chinese government, but his own backbenchers,” he said.

“It is motivated primarily by a desire to protect the government, not the Uighur.”

Raab denied the charge.