France’s National Assembly has adopted a resolution that denounces "genocide" by China against its Uyghur population, a minority Muslim group in the northeastern Xinjiang region, days before the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics.<\/p>\n
The text of the resolution reads that the Assembly "officially recognises the violence perpetrated by the People’s Republic of China against the Uyghurs as constituting crimes against humanity and genocide."<\/p>\n
It calls on the French government to do the same, and undertake "the necessary measures within the international community and in its foreign policy” to stop China’s actions towards the Uyghurs.<\/p>\n
The non-binding resolution, which was proposed by the opposition Socialists, but backed by President Emmanuel Macron’s LaRem party, was adopted almost unanimously – 169 votes for, one against, five abstentions – two weeks before the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics.<\/p>\n
China denies genocide in Xinjiang and has turned down repeated requests from the UN High Commission for Human Rights to visit the region to investigate.<\/p>\n
Socialist party leader Olivier Faure, whose party proposed the resolution, gave testimony to fellow lawmakers from Uyghurs who told of terrible conditions in interment camps in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n
China has accused those Uyghurs who have testified abroad of being liars, and has said the camps are vocational centres designed to combat extremism.<\/p>\n
“China is a great power; we love Chinese people,” said Faure. “But we refuse to submit to propaganda from a regime that is banking on our cowardice and our avarice to perpetrate a genocide in plain sight.”<\/p>\n
He denounced large Western brands that “continue to use forced labour” of the Uyghur population.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
France\u2019s National Assembly has adopted a resolution that denounces “genocide” by China against its Uyghur population, a minority Muslim group in the northeastern Xinjiang region, days before the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":58912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[414],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-news-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iumsonline.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}