The British government on Monday suspended its extradition agreements with Hong Kong, a move that comes after China enacted its new national security law.
“Obviously we have concerns about what is happening in Hong Kong,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in an interview with ITV News.
The extradition treaty had allowed the British authorities to ask Hong Kong to hand over a person suspected of having committed a crime in the United Kingdom, and vice versa.
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The United Kingdom said it feared that China’s new law could abuse the 30-year deal and was concerned that anyone extraditing to Hong Kong could be sent to mainland China, where they could face unfair prosecution and sanction.
The controversial national security legislation imposed by Beijing on July 1 gives China radical new powers over Hong Kong.
The United States, Australia and Canada have also suspended extradition agreements with the territory.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the move to suspend extradition is also rooted in concerns about China’s alleged human rights abuses, particularly regarding the treatment of the Uighur minority.
“We will protect our vital interests,” he said. “We will defend our values and make China comply with its international obligations.
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On Sunday, the BBC pressured the Chinese ambassador to Britain in images that allegedly showed blindfolded Uighurs forced to board trains.
“There are no such concentration camps in Xinjiang,” said Liu Xiaoming. “There are a lot of false accusations against China.”
In recent days there have been allegations of atrocities committed against the Uighurs, a predominantly secular Muslim ethnic minority.
A report, released in June, documents the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. There was also a seizure by the United States Customs and Border Protection Office of 13 tons of products made of human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighur women who were held captive in the concentration camps.
“Both events evoke chilling parallels with past atrocities elsewhere, the forced sterilization of minorities, the disabled and indigenous, and the glass screen image of mountains of hair preserved in Auschwitz,” wrote Rayhan Asat and Yonah Diamond of Foreign Policy.
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They added that the mass concentration camps are “designed to cause serious physical, psychological and mental breakdown to the Uighurs.”
In addition to the extradition suspension between the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, Raab said that an arms embargo on China will also be extended to include Hong Kong.
Fox News’s Lucia Suárez Sang contributed to this report.
