The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee this week approved bipartisan legislation to support Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities subject to human rights abuses by China.
The Uyghur Policy Act is the latest legislative effort to protect the rights of persecuted Muslim minority. The U.S. government has determined that China’s treatment of Uyghurs amounts to genocide.
The bill is co-sponsored by nine Republicans and Democrats led by Rep. Young Kim and Rep. Ami Bera, who are the chair and ranking member respectively of the House sub-committee for East Asia and the Pacific.
The legislation calls on the State Department to respond to abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – the Uyghur homeland inside China -- and push back on Chinese Communist Party efforts to silence Uyghur voices, and to develop a strategy to close detention facilities and political reeducation camps.
It also requires the U.S. secretary of state to oversee human rights-related policies to preserve Uyghurs’ ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic identities.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the bill on Tuesday. It faces various legislative hurdles before it becomes law, including passage by the full House and Senate.
The legislation was passed by the House of Representatives in both of the past two congressional terms without advancing further.
The last Congress renewed separate legislation, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, that authorized sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for genocide against Uyghurs. Another law, passed in 2021 and which has had the most impact, makes it illegal to import products used Uyghur forced labor into the United States.
Also this week, the World Uyghur Congress, the main global umbrella group advocating for Uyghurs, said it had filed a legal complaint in Paris against three French subsidiaries of major Chinese companies: Dahua Technology France, Hikvision France, and Huawei France.
The submission, made by prominent French human rights lawyer, accuses the three Chinese companies of complicity in crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Uyghurs by allegedly helping to build and maintain a mass surveillance system.
RFA has reached out to three companies in France for comment.
Edited by Mat Pennington.