Uighur minority women surrounded by Chinese police in Urumqi, during the July 2019 riots.
China's treatment of the Uighurs, the Muslim minority in Xinjiang province in the northwest of the country, is genocide.
This is how the majority of the Congress of the Netherlands described it this Thursday in its last session before the general elections, scheduled for March 17.
It is the first time that a Chamber has declared in Europe genocidal the practices of surveillance, persecution and forced internment in Beijing against the members of this group, denounced by the NGOs and the exiles of this community.
Dutch MPs consider that China violates the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), and they have gone beyond the official position of the center-right government in office.
He prefers to speak of a violation of human rights and leave the consideration of genocide in the hands of the UN, or the International Criminal Court.
About 12 million Uighurs live in China, the majority in Xinjiang.
More than a million of them are locked up in internment camps, where they are stripped of their rights and even suffer forced sterilizations, according to human rights organizations.
Earlier this month, the BBC published a report on the systematic rape of women from this community in the same centers.
In 2019, an international investigation
titled
The secret cables of China
,
revealed the formulas of repression of the Chinese Government against the minority.
The motion presented in the Congress of the Netherlands had the majority support of the deputies to endorse the classification of genocide, including three of the four parties of the center-right coalition in power.
They were against the right-wing liberals, the majority group, to which Prime Minister Mark Rutte belongs.
The Dutch Executive, which has been in office since its resignation en bloc last January due to a scandal of family allowances, does not deny the allegations of forced labor and sterilizations, rapes, sexual abuse, torture or any other form of aggression against the Uighurs.
However, the Executive considers that to speak of genocide it is necessary to demonstrate "the intention to destroy, totally or partially, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
A task that, according to Stef Blok, Foreign Minister, is not the responsibility of Dutch politicians.
Blok has admitted that the situation in China is "alarming, very worrying, without a doubt, but the Government of the Netherlands already calls the attention at European level to put an end to the violation of human rights", he said.
The US Congress urges to sanction China for the repression against the Uighur minority
The Canadian Parliament approved this Monday a non-binding motion that equates the treatment of Uighurs by China with genocide, a step that provoked the protest of the Chinese embassy, which issued a statement in which the "hypocrisy of use human rights to interfere in the internal affairs of the country ”.
In January this year, Mike Pompeo, the outgoing US Secretary of State, made a similar accusation of genocide against the Uighurs shortly before leaving office, giving way to the government of the new president, Joe Biden.