Uyghur Rights Leader Urges Labour Government To "Honour Their Promises" To Condemn China

Rahima Mahmut has gathered evidence of human rights abuses from Uyghur camp survivors (Alamy)

5 min read2 hr

A leading Uyghur human rights campaigner has called on the Government to fulfil its promises to condemn and take action against China's persecution of Uyghur Muslims, as reports emerge that ministers have softened their stance.

Earlier this year before the UK General Election, Rahima Mahmut told PoliticsHome she was calling on all the major UK political parties to recognise the persecution of Uyghur Muslims by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as 'genocide' and include legislation to ban the import of goods connected with forced Uyghur labour in their party manifestos.

Only the Liberal Democrats did include the recognition of Uyghur 'genocide' in their manifesto, but Labour’s then-Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy used the term himself and said he would push to find legal routes to recognise the treatment of Uyghurs as genocide.

Labour, with Lammy as Foreign Secretary, has now backtracked on these plans, according to The Guardian. Lammy is expected to travel to Beijing and Shanghai this weekend for high-level talks, hoping to build closer economic ties with China. As part of this shift, the Government has reportedly dropped its tough stance towards China over its treatment of the Uyghur community.

Mahmut, the UK director of World Uyghur Congress and executive director of the charity Stop Uyghur Genocide, told PoliticsHome that the first 100 days of the Labour government had created a "very mixed feeling" among human rights activists. After the reports of the government backtracking, she said that "no words can describe the distress of the Uyghur community at this disappointment".

“When we spoke last time, I was really hopeful that if Labour came to power, that might be different, because the Conservative government stance on the Uyghur situation was very loud in condemning, but very little action," Mahmut said.

"After two, three months, you will have some kind of idea whether the government will really take tangible action or not. At the moment, it's a very mixed feeling and that worries me a lot. We really need to work hard to make sure that those promises are delivered, especially on forced labour goods and the human rights abusing tech that the US government already blacklisted.

"We have tons of evidence against these technologies that played very important role enabling the high tech surveillance and the high tech genocide of the Uyghurs, enabling [the CCP] to intern millions of people."

She said that while Labour was in opposition, her organisations had the "full support from Labour MPs from top to bottom" – but felt the Government has now gone quiet on the issue now it has the power to make a difference.

“Generally, we really need the government to act and really honour the words, the statements, the promises from when they were in a shadow position," she added.

"Those ministers who criticised the Conservative government, now they have the power, and they have the opportunity to really act.”

While Mahmut said she understood that domestic issues and other conflicts had dominated the new administration's priorities, she was "disappointed" to not hear more from the Government on condemning China.

"For the last two years because of Ukraine and especially since October 7 last year, the Uyghur issues have been completely sidelined," she said.

“It's been an extremely difficult battle for people like myself, who's been cut off from my own family, my sisters and brothers and my friends for more than seven years now, and the Chinese government has been really investing so much more money and power on this information campaign, covering up and making the region [Xinjiang] a tourist attraction, beautifying the surface where there are these dark secrets – millions, suffering families like mine, they cannot call me and speak to me, and we know the evidence of the slave labour is so overwhelming.”

Blair McDougall, the new Labour MP for East Renfrewshire, is hoping to chair the Uyghur All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) of crossbench MPs. He told PoliticsHome that while the economic power of China was a "fact of life", it also gave an opportunity to find "new levers" to condemn the Chinese state's actions.

"They're deeply integrated into the world economy, and that gives us opportunities to find new levers, like for example, saying that we don't think it's right that goods come from Xinjiang into the UK economy while there's such widespread evidence of slave labour and other kind of egregious human rights issues in that part of the world," he said.

“It's too early to judge the new government on that, but that's certainly something that I'm going to be sort of exploring, because I think it would be right for the UK to follow the United States lead on that.”

The Foreign Office (FCDO) is taking the position that any judgment as to whether crimes against humanity or genocide have occurred is a matter for a national or international court, and is carrying out a review on how to tackle forced labour in private and public supply chains.

Mahmut said she welcomed the fact that a review was taking place, but questioned what it would involve: "What kind of process will they take and what evidence will they rely on, and whether they will really include people like me and many other experts and survivors?" she said.

"We know that it is impossible for [the UK government] to go to the region to investigate, but we have scholars, experts, leaked documents and the report by the UN, Amnesty, International Human Rights Watch…"

An FCDO spokesperson told PoliticsHome: “This Government stands firm on human rights, including in Xinjiang, where China continues to persecute and arbitrarily detain Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities.

“This includes raising our concerns at the highest levels of the Chinese government and coordinating efforts with our international partners to hold China to account for human rights violations."

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