Sec. 2. Findings

744 words·~3 min read·/bill/117/hr/3306/ih/section-2

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Congress finds the following: Eyewitness accounts provide credible documentation of widespread forced sterilization and sexual violence against Uyghur and Kazakh women in the People’s Republic of China, including investigations and independent interviews by global media outlets. Women who survived internment camps report that they were forced to undergo multiple injections of unknown medicines that caused temporary or permanent loss of menstrual cycles. Chinese Government documents demonstrate rapid declines in population in two predominately Uyghur prefectures of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region between 2015 and 2018, and an unprecedented near-zero birth rate target for 2020 in one district.

Government documents mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment in training camps. Chinese Government documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur populated regions of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, to be continued in 2020 with increased funding. Publicly available budgets indicate that this project had sufficient funding to perform hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures in 2019 and 2020.

In 2019, the Government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the four southern, rural, minority prefectures to intrusive birth-prevention surgeries. A leaked report written by Nankai University researchers for the Chinese Government confirms the intent of intention of state-organized forced labor transfers as having the ultimate purpose of assimilating Uyghurs, breaking up their society, and altering demographic trends.

The policy of state-sponsored forced population-transfer program, which separates married couples and forcibly places unmarried individuals into controlled environments where they cannot marry or form a family, is a violation of the fundamental right to marry and to found a family, as codified by Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Under the becoming family homestay program initiated by the government of the People’s Republic of China in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, government workers and other Communist Party members are assigned to live with ethnic minority families in their homes to conduct surveillance and compile information on family members, in arrangements which leave these families vulnerable to sexual violence and other types of abuse.

On January 7, 2021, an official social media account for the Government of China said that a Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines [and] … . They are more confident and independent. . Uyghur and Kazakh women who have given testimony to reporters about sexual violence and forced sterilizations in mass internment camps have been intimidated and their families threatened by security officials from the People’s Republic of China.

Article Two of the Genocide Convention of 1948, which China has signed and ratified, states that genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. . On January 19, 2021, the Secretary of State released a determination about atrocities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that stated that the ongoing crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups include forced sterilization, and called upon the PRC immediately to release all arbitrarily detained persons and abolish its system of internment, detention camps, house arrest and forced labor; cease coercive population control measures, including forced sterilizations, forced abortion, forced birth control, and the removal of children from their families; and end all torture and abuse in places of detention . . . .

That same determination concluded that, after careful examination of the facts, the Government of China was committing genocide against Uyghur, Kazakh, and other ethnic minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Secretary of State Tony Blinken affirmed that the United States Government recognizes the atrocities faced by Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity and said the United States will hold the Government of China responsible for the atrocities committed in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.