Parents have been denied information about the whereabouts of their children
Credit: Guang Niu /Getty Images
Chinese authorities have forcibly separated Uighur families by taking children as young as five into state-run orphanages after their parents were forced into exile, a human rights group has said.
Parents have been denied information about the whereabouts of their children and refused permission to reunite with them abroad, Amnesty International said in a report published on Friday.
“China’s ruthless mass detention campaign in Xinjiang has put separated families in an impossible situation: children are not allowed to leave, but their parents face persecution and arbitrary detention if they attempt to return home to care for them,” said Alkan Akad, Amnesty International’s China Researcher.
Six families who were forced to leave their children in the care of grandparents and relatives when they fled the country told the Human Rights group that the children were not allowed to join them overseas, and were then forced into state care.
The families all left before a campaign of intensified repression began in Xinjiang in 2017.
UN experts have said that at least one million people have been detained in camps in Xinjiang since 2017
Credit: Thomas Peter/Reuters
They include Mihriban Kader and Ablikim Memtinin left four children in the temporary care of grandparents when they fled the region in 2016 after being harassed by police.
After the grandmother was taken to a camp and the grandfather was interrogated by police, the three youngest children were sent to an “orphan camp” for the children of jailed or exiled parents. The eldest was sent to a boarding school.
“Our other relatives didn’t dare to look after my children after what had happened to my parents,” Mihriban told Amnesty International. “They were afraid that they would be sent to camps, too.”
In another case, Omer and Meryem Faruh, who fled to Turkey in late 2016 after police demanded they hand over their passports, left their two youngest children aged five and six with grandparents because they did not yet have their own travel documents.
They later learnt that the grandparents had been arrested and sent to a camp, and they have not heard from the children since.
China’s mass detention campaign in Xinjiang has drawn international condemnation
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United Nations experts have said that at least one million people, mostly from the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group, have been detained in camps in Xinjiang since 2017.
The United States said in January that China had committed “genocide” in Xinjiang.
China denies abuses and says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight terrorism.
The Chinese Embassy in London said in an emailed comment that people in the camps have their rights and customs respected and that people from all over the world were welcome "to visit Xinjiang and see the region’s prosperity and the residents’ happy life with their own eyes".
"For quite some time, anti-China forces have been using Xinjiang-related matters to fabricate lies that slander and discredit China’s counter-terrorism and deradicalization efforts in Xinjiang," it added.
A committee of MPs said this week that some British firms could be complicit in the use of forced labour in the Xinjiang camps.
The House of Commons’ Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee said in a report published on Wednesday that businesses in the fashion, retail, media and technology sectors who do not take steps to prove their supply lines are slavery free should face fines.
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