Beijing: In recent years, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has increased its repression of the Uyghur, according to Voices Against Autocracy, which includes restricting their freedom of speech, expression, religion, and movement.
The oppression of Uyghurs has been cited in numerous media publications as China's most heinous act against humanity.
Voices Against Autocracy reports that over a million Uyghurs have been imprisoned in "re-education camps" by the Chinese government since 2017 and that those who have not been detained have been subjected to severe surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour, and forced sterilisation, ANI reported.
It has been regarded as "the largest incarceration of a minority group since the Holocaust" by Western researchers.
A UN Human Rights Office assessment released last year indicated "patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment" in the camps. The majority of prisoners detained in the camps never faced charges and were unable to challenge their detention through legal channels.
A recent report from Al Jazeera (published on May 4, 2023) citing a Human Rights Watch (HRW) forensic investigation claims that Chinese authorities have been keeping an eye on the phones of the Uyghur ethnic minority for the presence of 50,000 known multimedia files that have been used to flag what China views as extremism, with the mere possession of the Quran resulting in a police interrogation.
It should be noted that China continues to use its vast influence to sway UN procedures and make sure that its allies refrain from openly condemning the abuse of Uyghurs.
For only the second time in sixteen years, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) rejected a motion by the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to hold a discussion on human rights violations in Xinjiang in October 2022 after the release of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report, according to Voices Against Autocracy.
According to Michael Levitt's article in the Toronto Star regarding Chinese crimes against Uyghur minorities, attention to the plight of the Uyghur has slightly reduced.
He draws a conclusion to his argument by stating that one of the most horrifying crimes against humanity is China's oppression of Uyghurs.
In recent years, abuses of human rights have been a serious source of concern in China and Iran, according to the US State Department's annual report on religious freedom across the world.
The majority of the world's oppressive countries, according to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are getting worse.
"Governments in many parts of the world continue to target religious minorities using a host of methods, including torture, beatings, unlawful surveillance, and so-called re-education camps," he said.
Blinken brought up the mistreatment of the largely Muslim Uyghur minority in China's Xinjiang province, which one senior State Department official referred to as "one of the worst abusers of human rights and religious freedom in the world."
In a growing campaign of repression against religious belief intended to bring all theological activity under the Chinese Communist Party's supervision, the report accused Beijing of imprisoning 10,000 or more persons or more in 2022.
In the State Department's International Religious Freedom Report, there are numerous estimates of people who are imprisoned in the nation, ranging "from the low thousands to over 10,000."
The study, which covers the year 2022, noted that persecution has continued relentlessly. The US has already decided that Beijing's treatment of the Uyghurs constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity.