Mass detention of Uighurs has been superseded by trade talks

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing China Sanctions
BY AMY MACKINNON

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood participates in a protest march demanding the European Union take action against China in support of the Uighurs, in Brussels, on April 27, 2018.

Two human rights advocates who focus on China issues say they were told by U.S. officials last year that the Trump administration was preparing to impose sanctions on Beijing in December over its treatment of Uighur Muslims in the country’s western region of East Turkestan.
The advocates were given to understand that the sanctions would fall under the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. government to place travel bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers.
But when International Human Rights Day came and went on Dec. 10—the day the United States customarily unveils a tranche of such sanctions each year—no announcement was made. 

The administration squelched the plan in order to avoid harming trade talks with China.
“Discussions with government officials indicated that there would be sanctions forthcoming in December,” said Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director. 

A second human rights advocate, who did not want to be named, heard similar things in briefings with government officials.
Richardson said she has since heard from officials who expressed frustration that the sanctions issue was off the table due to the trade talks. 

She declined to identify the officials who had briefed her.
Rob Berschinski, the senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First, said his organization had also been “cautiously optimistic” that the sanctions on Chinese officials would be announced in December under the Global Magnitsky Act.
The U.S. failure to impose sanctions over China’s actions in East Turkestan—where it has forced up to a million Uighurs into internment camps—has been a big disappointment for the human rights community.
“While the U.S. is negotiating trade agreements, I think it’s important to remember that history is not going to remember the details of the negotiations but where the United States was on this massive human rights issue,” said Francisco Bencosme, the Asia-Pacific advocacy manager at Amnesty International USA.
At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States was considering imposing Magnitsky sanctions in many places, including China.
A spokesperson for the State Department said: “The United States is developing a whole-of-government strategy to address the unprecedented campaign of repression in East Turkestan.”
“In regards to specific actions by the United States, the State Department does not forecast potential sanctions.”
At the Treasury, a spokesperson said officials would not “telegraph sanctions or comment on prospective actions.”
A United Nations human rights panel has said China has turned East Turkestan, home to some 11 million people, mostly Uighurs, into a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” 

The Daily Beast has reported that China is also seeking to build a worldwide register of Uighurs who live abroad and has threatened to detain their relatives if they do not comply with requests for information from the Chinese police.
Many Uighurs living in the United States have family in the camps and face the dilemma to speak out—at the risk of more harm to their relatives—or keep silent.
“Every Uighur in the USA has family members in the concentration camps,” said Murat Ataman, whose brother, Dilshat Perhat Ataman, was taken to a camp in June 2018. 

Dilshat, an editor of a popular Uighur website, served a four-year sentence in prison between 2010 and 2014 on charges of endangering state security.
It took four months for Murat to learn that his brother had been taken to a camp. 

Uighurs in East Turkestan are forced to install monitoring apps on their cellphones, limiting their ability to communicate freely with the outside world and making it hard for their families abroad to track their whereabouts.
On March 27, Pompeo met with members of the Uighur diaspora. 

Among the group was Ferkat Jawdat, who came to the United States as a refugee in 2011. 

His mother and four of his father’s relatives are currently being detained in East Turkestan.
Five days after the meeting, Jawdat received a message from contacts in China that his aunt and uncle had been sent to the camps. 

Jawdat said that members of his family have previously been questioned about his activism in the United States.
“I decided to go public because I don’t know if I can save my mom or not, but I want to save the other people,” he said.
“China’s plan is to wipe out the whole nation. This will be written in the history books as a genocide... My children, your kids, they’re going to learn about this. I don’t want my daughter to one day ask me, ‘What did you do to stop this?’” Jawdat said.
Commenting on the suggestion that trade talks had been given priority over the mass incarceration of Muslims in China, he said: “The U.S. should give up some economic development to save our next generations.”
Members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties have repeatedly called on the Trump administration to place sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses in East Turkestan and have introduced sanctions bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“For nearly a year I have joined my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in demanding the Trump Administration impose sanctions on Chinese officials directly involved in putting roughly a million Uighurs into internment camps,” Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, said in a statement to Foreign Policy.
At a rally in support of the Uighurs in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, successive speakers called for the United States to place sanctions on Chinese officials.
“Each time the world swears never again. When will we actually mean it?” said Dolkun Isa, the president of the World Uyghur Congress.
Given China’s influential economic clout, many members of the Uighur community see the United States as their only hope.
Among Muslim countries, only Turkey has sharply condemned China for its treatment of the Uighurs and other Muslims. 

Muslim-majority states have even supported it. 

In 2017, Egypt detained and deported dozens of Uighur students back to China. 

On a visit to China this year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom supported China’s right to undertake anti-terrorism measures. 

Last month, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—whose 57 member states have substantial Muslim populations—passed a resolution that commended China’s efforts to care for its Muslim citizens.
China has invested heavily in countries across Central Asia and the Middle East as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Berschinski of Human Rights First, who previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, said 2018 was the first year that no sanctions were announced under the Magnitsky Act or the Global Magnitsky Act on International Human Rights Day.
No official explanation was given, although Berschinski suggested that perhaps a work overload at the Treasury Department may have been a contributing factor.
The Magnitsky Act takes its name from a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison after exposing widespread corruption. 

Passed in 2012, the law enabled the U.S. government to place sanctions on human rights abusers. 

The Global Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2016, extended that ability to the rest of the world.
“People are starting to get concerned that the administration is giving up on Global Magnitsky sanctions,” Berschinski said.

The Magnitsky Act : Trump has the power to fight China on human rights. Will he use it?

President Trump inherits law originally aimed at Russia that allows him to sanction any official involved in violations – and China activists have put forward a list.

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

The human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng was one of the Chinese government’s high-profile targets. 

As Donald Trump enters the White House, human rights campaigners around the world fear his administration will drop support for global struggles for democracy and freedom. 

But his administration is armed with a new law unprecedented in US history: the ability to sanction any individual involved in human rights abuses.
Now a newly formed NGO is hoping to push the US to sanction a slew of Chinese names, focusing on prosecutors and police who handle cases of prominent human rights activists. 

Potential punishments including travel bans, freezing assets and seizing property.
“There is well documented evidence that Chinese officials routinely commit gross violations of human rights against dissidents and human rights defenders,” said Senator Benjamin Cardin, the sponsor of the law. 

“Those officials responsible for such violations should be investigated under the act.”
The Magnitsky Act was first passed in 2012 but until December 2016 it only applied to Russia. 

It is named after the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was accused officials of stealing state funds and subsequently died in custody.
It was used this month to blacklist five Russian officials including Alexander Bastrykin, the powerful head of Russia’s investigative committee who reports directly to Vladimir Putin.
With its global expansion in December a group of veteran China activists established the China Human Rights Accountability Center with the singular goal of collecting evidence to mount cases under the Magnitsky Act.
“China’s human rights record is the worst in the world, surely in terms of scale, and this law sends a strong and clear message to Chinese officials,” said Teng Biao, one of the founders and a visiting fellow at New York University. 

“Being sanctioned would be a huge embarrassment and a confirmation of the suffering inflicted by so many.”
While convincing the US government to publicly sanction Chinese officials may be an uphill battle, the law specifically says the president will consider “information obtained by … nongovernmental organisations”.
The state department will submit a report to Congress sometime in April with a list of names. 

Even if the activists fail in having all of them sanctioned, they plan to put the detailed evidence on their website for the public to see.
“The name of the game is to scare, shame and embarrass officials who violate human rights,” said Yaxue Cao, another founder and editor of the human rights website ChinaChange.org.
The group is preparing to submit evidence for at least three names so far, including Jia Lianchun, a judge who presided over the trials of three prominent human rights activists including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. 

Liu was jailed for 11 years.
The others are Xia Baolong, who led a campaign against Christian groups as the Communist party boss of Zhejiang province; and Li Qun, who put the blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng under house arrest. 

Chen is also a founding member of the accountability centre.
Other potential targets for the NGO are the police and prosecutors who handled the case of Cao Shunli, a rights lawyer who died in 2014 – like Magnitsky, in police custody. 

The centre also plans to investigate the officials who prosecuted Ilham Tohti, an economics professor and member of the Uighur minority who was jailed for life and later given the prestigious Martin Ennals award.
“In the past the US criticised and we expressed our values but we really haven’t had any very effective tools to influence China,” said Susan Shirk, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state. “It was a very frustrating situation to feel that we don’t have the tools to really have much impact in these types of cases.”
Shirk, who is now the chair of the 21st Century China Centre at the University of California San Diego, pointed to US citizens held in China and often denied due process as a group that could benefit from the Magnitsky Act.
One prominent case is that of Sandy Phan-Gillis, an American who was charged with spying after being held for over a year and is believed to have been tortured, with the UN saying her detention is a violation of international law.
Many human rights activists in China and around the world are worried that Trump’s presidency will mean less focus on human rights but members of Congress have made clear it is still a foreign policy priority.
“We look forward to working with the new administration to make sure that the law is carried out in full, and without fear or favour,” Cardin said.
“We expect that the administration will take the necessary actions to implement the law and we in Congress will do our job of oversight to make sure that that is the case.”
Members of the centre say they hope professional diplomats will still push these causes, with Cao saying: “Trump can’t control everyone and there are many in the state department passionate about human rights.
“Trump has said he wants to restart, rethink and remap China-US relations, and he will put human rights into play because that’s something he can use in negotiations.
“Considering how bad China’s human rights record is, if no Chinese officials are on the list then that will stink for Trump’s administration.”
While most of the NGO’s founding members are based in the US, Hu Jia, having been denied a passport for years, remains in Beijing and could bear the brunt of any government reprisals.
“This is very dangerous work, but ever since I started doing human rights work I was more concerned for my family’s wellbeing than my own,” Hu said. 

“I’m the man of action on the ground and I hope I can help bring this law to life, give it power and have it make an impact.”
Police have been stationed outside Hu’s home for more than a decade beginning in 2004, even keeping watch over his wife and daughter while he was in prison for three and a half years. 

But Hu feels more at ease that only he will bear the brunt of any government reprisal now that his ex-wife and daughter are living in Hong Kong.
Hu said Australia, Canada and European countries should follow America’s lead and enact similar legislation, grasping a unique opportunity to make an impact.
“On the surface all these officials are very patriotic but in reality they’ve all stashed their money in the US,” Hu said.