Study: China Using Extradition Treaties to Target Uyghurs in Central Asia

Beijing has recently ramped up its use of established extradition treaties with Central Asian nations to target Chinese-origin Uyghurs and transport them back to China to face criminal proceedings for alleged offenses, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported on Monday.

Bradley Jardine, a fellow at the Wilson Center, published a study on April 25, titled “Great Wall Of Steel.” The analysis detailed tactics used by the Chinese government to target Uyghurs (a Turkic-speaking, mainly Sunni Muslim ethnic minority in China’s westernmost Xinjiang region) in Central Asia, which borders Xinjiang to its west.

RFE/RL — which, along with the Wilson Center think tank, is U.S. government-funded — interviewed Jardine on April 25. Jardine shared some examples of the “tools” Beijing employs to forcibly deport Xinjiang-origin Uyghurs from Central Asia.

“Within the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], there are a number of treaties that allow for mutual extradition [with] no questions asked between member states,” he told RFE/RL on Monday.

“There are also some frameworks for counterterrorist cooperation, [such as] intelligence sharing of anyone who’s been flagged as a terrorist, [often] with minimal evidence in most cases. This [type of cooperation] has really accelerated [and] made the region very dangerous and hostile [for Uyghurs],” Jardine noted.

“Great Wall Of Steel” documented “5,532 cases of Uyghurs facing intimidation, 1,150 cases of Uyghurs detained in a host country, and 424 cases of Uyghurs deported or extradited to China, from 1997 to January 2022.”

The SCO is a China and Russia-led security bloc uniting several nations across Central and South Asia. In addition to serving as a security alliance, the SCO also establishes political and economic cooperation between member states. Some observers consider the SCO to be an Eastern counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Permanent members of the SCO include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and India.

The SCO has granted limited “observer status” to Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Belarus since its founding in Shanghai, China, in 2001. Iran in September 2021 succeeded in gaining approval for full admittance to the SCO after a nearly 15-year bid, though the formal process to grant Tehran permanent membership was expected to take up to two years.

Almost all of the SCO’s combined permanent member states and “observer” nations (Russia, Mongolia, Kazhakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India) share land borders with China’s Xinjiang region, with the exception of Uzbekistan, Belarus, and Iran.

Various sections of the land borders connecting India, Pakistan, and China are admittedly disputed between all three nations.

“Beijing launched a brutal crackdown that has swept more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities into detention camps and prisons in its western Xinjiang Province under the pretext of fighting Islamist extremism [since about 2017],” RFE/RL recalled on Monday.

“[T]hose efforts have led to allegations of imposing forced labor, mass internment, forced birth control, erasing Uyghur cultural and religious identity, as well as accusations of genocide,” the broadcaster noted.