By ETNAM
February 27, 2020 – Washington, DC
On November 15, 2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 55/25, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which was signed by 117 states and ratified by 175 states in the United Nations. China ratified the Protocol on February 8, 2010 but continues to engage in state sponsored human trafficking as of 2020.
For decades, under its brutal policies of colonization and genocide, China has forcibly trafficked Uighur women, youth, and children out of East Turkistan into Chinese provinces. In 2006, the Chinese government announced its 11th -5 year plan (2006-2010) in which some 400,000 young Uighur women would be transferred into eastern China for work. In 2007, the Xinjiang Daily reported on March 20, 2007 that there had been 240,000 instances of the transfer of the local labor force from East Turkistan’s Kashgar Region to China’s eastern provinces in 2006 alone. Since 2010, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been forcibly transferred via state sponsored human trafficking to eastern China.
Since 2016, China has detained over 3 million Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Tatars in its brutal system of concentration camps, prisons, and labor camps across East Turkistan. More recently with the coronavirus spreading across China and much of the world, the Chinese government has continued its transfer of Uighurs, especially young men and women, and children into Chinese provinces in eastern China for “work” or “school” while it continues its colonial policies by settling millions of Han Chinese settlers into East Turkistan.
In recent days, numerous footages and photos have emerged showing China’s continued policies of forced transfer of Uighurs out of East Turkistan into eastern China. This nothing less than state sponsored human trafficking. The Chinese government is clearly violating the UN Trafficking Protocol and the basic human rights of Uighurs and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan. China’s brutal campaign of mass interment, forced labor, forced abortions, and forced population transfers is a calculated systematic campaign of wholesale genocide of Uighurs and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan.
We urgently call on the Governments of the Free World, international human rights organizations, and others to call on the United Nations Security Council to put the East Turkistan issue on its agenda and seek to end this systematic 21st century Holocaust like Genocide. We again call on the UN to uphold to the Genocide Convention, the Trafficking Protocol, and other international agreements which China is severely violating as it continues its systematic genocide of Uighurs and other in East Turkistan.