US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo on Tuesday (local time) said that the recently leaked documents over the high-security prison camps in the far western region of Xinjiang confirmed China's human rights violations against Uighurs Muslims.
"We've all seen the Xinjiang papers released in recent days. They detailed the Chinese party's brutal detention in the systematic repression of Uighurs and other members of Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang," Pompeo was quoted as saying by Anadolu Agency during a press conference.
"These reports are consistent with an overwhelming and growing part of the evidence the Chinese communist party is committing human rights violations and abuses against individuals in mass detentions," he added.
The diplomat was referring to the 'China Cables' that were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a global network of investigative journalists based in Washington- show how Uighurs are locked up, indoctrinated and punished inside the detention camps.
The investigation has found new evidence which undermines Beijing's claims that the detention camps, which have been built across Xinjiang in the last three years to detain at least a million of Uighur Muslims, provide voluntary re-education purposes to counter extremism to the inmates who are detained without trial.
The leaked cache includes a nine-page memo sent out in 2017 by Zhu Hailun, the then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang's Communist Party and the region's top security official, to those who run the camps.
Earlier this month, another trove of Chinese government documents leaked to the New York Times revealed details about Beijing's fears about religious extremism and its wholesale crackdown on Uighurs.
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The US calls on the Chinese government to "immediately release all of those who are arbitrarily detained and to end its draconian policies that have terrorised its own citizens in Xinjiang," said Pompeo.
As many as 1 million people, or about 7 per cent of Xinjiang's Muslim population, have been incarcerated in a sprawling network of "political re-education" camps, according to U.S. and UN studies.
Last September, the New York-based Human Rights Watch released a report accusing Beijing of a "systematic campaign of human rights violations" against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
Beijing says its camps in Xinjiang are "vocational training centres.