By Jerome A. Cohen
Here is a terrific, comprehensive explanation from SupChina of helpful reports and articles about Xinjiang’s “re-education camps” . While China tries hard to conceal information, the materials currently available should prompt the United Nations and its human rights regime—including human rights treaty bodies, the Human Rights Council and its Special Procedures—to investigate and to condemn with confidence these atrocities in Xinjiang.
The outside of a newly built internment camp in Turpan, Xinjiang. Picture by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Chin.
It also makes one ask: what evidence is necessary under the Global Magnitsky Act in the United States to apply sanctions not only against those who are actually carrying out these abuses, starting with Chen Quanguo, the Party chief in Xinjiang, but also against those in Beijing who are instructing Chen to do so? We all know who runs China today!
This reminds me of the time in 1964 that I had an opportunity to have coffee in Hong Kong with Zhang Guotao (Chang Kuo-tao), one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party who later split with Mao and remained in exile. I wanted to understand why Communist leaders had such mistrust of law and a genuine legal system. Zhang said that, while he did not know much about law and neither did Mao, perhaps he could give me an example that might help answer my question. In effect he then said: “If A kills B, no system would have trouble punishing A. But what if A merely tells B to kill C and B does it, how could a legal system punish A?” That, Zhang said, was probably the kind of thinking that underlay Mao’s mistrust!
The U.S. legal system usually is not troubled by such a simplistic challenge!