Uighur exiles urged the International Criminal Court on Monday to investigate Beijing for genocide and crimes against humanity, the first attempt to use international law to hold the ruling Chinese Communist Party accountable for its draconian crackdown on the Muslim minority.
A London-based team of lawyers representing two Uighur activist groups has filed a complaint against Beijing for pursuing the repatriation of thousands of Uighurs through illegal arrests or deportation of Cambodia and Tajikistan. The case could generate further international scrutiny of the power of the Chinese state to impose its will beyond its borders.
The lawyers’ 80-page presentation includes a list of more than 30 Chinese officials who they said were responsible for the campaign, including Xi Jinping, the leader of the Communist Party.
Mr. Xi’s policies in recent years have placed Muslim minorities in the western Xinjiang region of China under a widespread network of surveillance, detention and social reengineering. Up to a million ethnic Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities have been detained in internment camps in the region, leading to growing global condemnation.
The court’s mandate is to seek justice for victims of genocide, war crimes and other atrocities. But China does not recognize its jurisdiction, raising the question of how far the case will go.
Rodney Dixon, a British lawyer who is leading the case, said he sidestepped the issue of jurisdiction over Beijing by focusing on claims of China’s illegal acts in Cambodia and Tajikistan, two countries that are members of the court.
“This may become a critical case because it was assumed for so long that nothing could be done to hold China accountable in an international tribunal,” Dixon said by telephone from London before traveling to The Hague.
Citing a 2018 court ruling, Dixon said: “The court has said that it has jurisdiction when crimes begin or end in a member state, and that is the case here.”
The 2018 ruling applied to Myanmar, which has also not signed the court treaty. The court ruled that it could prosecute Myanmar for “deportation” and associated crimes against Rohingya Muslims who fled to Bangladesh, which is a member.
The two Uighur groups that filed the complaint against China are the East Turkestan Government-in-exile and the East Turkestan National Awakening Movement. The groups advocate the independence of Xinjiang, a region they refer to not by their official Chinese name, but as East Turkestan, the name of two short-lived Uighur republics.
His complaint also broadly points to China’s policies in Xinjiang over the past decade and the imposition of increasingly harsh security measures following a series of violent riots. The Uighurs have long resented the authorities’ tight controls on their religion and culture and the influx of Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, into Xinjiang.
Under the command of Mr. Xi, the Xinjiang government expanded efforts to cajole, pressure or compel the Uighurs to return from abroad, and also established internment camps aimed at indoctrinating the Uighurs to stay away from religion and adopt Chinese rule. It has imposed programs that push minorities into jobs as factory workers and street cleaners.
Authorities are also carrying out an expansive and troublesome campaign to dramatically reduce the birth rate among minority groups in Xinjiang using forced sterilization and abortions, according to research by The Associated Press and Adrian Zenz, a German investigator.
Dixon, the British lawyer, said the complaint against Beijing included evidence of forced deportations and extraterritorial arrests by Chinese agents, assemblies of witnesses and victims, reports by the United Nations and organizations like Amnesty International and exile groups.
“The prosecutor needs to investigate the genocide,” said Dixon. “If you capture people and you have a campaign to suppress and sterilize them, it is a campaign that tries to dilute and destroy their identity as a group.”
It may be months before the chief prosecutor of the international tribunal, Fatou Bensouda of The Gambia, issues a formal response to the lawyers’ presentation.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately comment on the complaint. But the Chinese government has repeatedly rejected evidence of widespread repression of minorities in Xinjiang.
“Xinjiang fully implements the policy of freedom of religious belief,” the ministry said last week in a lengthy rebuttal to recent criticism of China’s human rights record. “Xinjiang has never restricted the freedom of travel of the Uighurs or any other ethnic group.”
China’s response to the presentation may reflect that of the Trump administration in cases involving Americans. The administration has fiercely attacked the international court for initiating an investigation into possible war crimes by US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described it as “a kangaroo court,” and President Trump called for economic sanctions and travel restrictions to be imposed on court employees involved in investigations of Americans.
Chris Buckley contributed reporting.
