Prosecutors at the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) have refused to investigate the plight of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China's Xinjiang region, as China is not a member of the ICC, report says published Monday, December 14.
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The office of the ICC attorney general, Fatou Bensouda, explained that with regard to acts committed on Chinese territory and China not being a signatory to the Treaty of Rome which created the ICC in 2002, such an investigation was impossible. .
This precondition for the exercise of the territorial jurisdiction of the Court does not appear to be met with regard to the majority of cases presented "by members of the Uyghur community in exile, argued the prosecutor's office in its report.
In addition, with regard to the forced deportations of Uyghur populations to China from Tajikistan and Cambodia denounced by the Uyghur community, the prosecutor's office considered that "
there was at this stage no sufficient elements
”to initiate investigations.
Members of the Uyghur community in exile considered that Tajikistan and Cambodia being parties to the Treaty of Rome and the events having taken place in their territories, the ICC could launch investigations into these denounced deportations.
The Uyghurs are the main ethnic group in Xinjiang, a huge region of China which notably has common borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Regularly hit by deadly attacks, attributed by Beijing to separatists or Uyghur Islamists, the region is under heavy police surveillance.
More than a million people, mainly Muslims, were interned there in "
camps
", accuse human rights organizations.
China claims that these are "
vocational training centers
", intended to help the population find employment and thus remove them from religious extremism.