Rights groups urge UN to probe China crackdown in Xinjiang

Rights groups urged the United Nations Monday to send investigators to China's northwestern Xinjiang province to probe the mass detainment of ethnic Uighur and other Muslim minorities.

"The abuse in Xinjiang today is so severe that it cries out for international action," Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth told reporters in Geneva.

HRW and more than a dozen other human rights and civil society organisations including Amnesty International and the World Uighur Congress, published an appeal for the UN's human rights body to send an international fact-finding mission to the region.

Up to a million Uighurs and members of other mostly Muslim minority groups are being held in extrajudicial detention in camps in Xinjiang, according to a group of experts cited by the UN.

Dolkun Isa of the World Uighur Congress told reporters via video link from Oslo that his group believes the numbers detained in Xinjiang had reached "maybe three million".

Beijing says the "vocational education centres" help people steer clear of terrorism and allow them to be reintegrated into society.

But critics say China is seeking to assimilate Xinjiang's minority population and suppress religious and cultural practices that conflict with Communist ideology and the dominant Han culture.

In their statement, the organisations insisted that the sites were in fact "political education" camps, where people are sent "for their perceived disloyalty to the government and the Chinese Communist Party."
UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet has addressed the situation, voicing concern last September before the Human Rights Council at "deeply disturbing allegations of large-scale arbitrary detentions of Uighurs and other Muslim commnities in so-called reeduction camps across Xinjiang."