The British capital of London will play host to a ‘People’s Tribunal’ examining claims of genocide perpetrated against the Uyghur people of the Chinese province of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan.
The ‘Uyghur Tribunal’ will see a panel of eight hear evidence from around 30 witnesses, according to the BBC, with participants telling the publicly-funded broadcaster that they see the hearing as “a platform to tell our stories”.
“What we hope to achieve is to provide facts that others may use,” said Sir Geoffrey Nice, a British barrister who was previously part of the long-running and controversial prosecution of Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milošević, which ultimately came to nothing when he died in custody.
Sir Geoffrey, who will be chairing the panel, said that it will “not look outside the crimes it has been asked to investigate, and it will not overreach by making recommendations about what others should or shouldn’t do. It will simply provide facts for others to use.”
“The tribunal is an independent endeavour and it will deal with the evidence and only with the evidence,” added vice-chairman Nick Vetch, the boss of Britain’s largest self-storage company, the Big Yellow Group, in comments to the AFP.
“We have invited the [Chinese Communist Party] to provide us with any evidence they may have. So far we’ve received nothing from them,” added the businessman, who organised the tribunal and previously put together a similar event looking at the issue of organ harvesting in China.
Sir Geoffrey Nice was also involved in this earlier initiative, which concluded “unanimously, beyond reasonable doubt, that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practised for a substantial period of time” and involved a “very substantial number of victims”.
The Chinese foreign ministry has already dismissed the Uyghur Tribunal as “not even a real tribunal or special court, but only a special machine producing lies,” however.
Speaking for the CCP regime in Xinjiang, official spokesman Xu Guixiang branded the Ughur Tribunal a “total violation of international law and order, a serious desecration of the victims of real genocide, and a serious provocation to the 25 million people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang”.
“It was founded by people with ulterior motives and carries no weight or authority. It is just a clumsy public opinion show under the guise of law,” said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.
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