China’s Uighurs face interrogation for having Quran, report says | Human Rights Information

Taipei, Taiwan – Chinese language authorities monitor the telephones of ethnic minority Uighurs for the presence of fifty,000 recognized multimedia recordsdata which might be used to flag violent extremism, with possession of the Quran sufficient to set off a police interrogation, based on a forensic investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Whereas the record of “violent and terrorist” content material consists of violent audio, video and pictures produced by militant teams akin to ISIS (ISIL), it additionally consists of materials from organisations that promote the identification or self-determination of Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority, in far-western Xinjiang.

The organisations embrace the separatist East Turkestan independence motion, the World Uyghur Congress exile group and the US government-funded information outlet Radio Free Asia.

The recordsdata additionally embrace details about the 1989 Tiananmen Sq. bloodbath, which is closely censored in China.

Some content material flagged for evaluate, nonetheless, is non-political, together with a Chinese language journey present filed in Syria referred to as “On the Highway”, readings from the Quran and Islamic songs, based on a metadata evaluation of the record by the rights group.

“The Chinese language authorities outrageously but dangerously conflates Islam with violent extremism to justify its abhorrent abuses towards Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang,” mentioned Maya Wang, appearing China director at HRW.

“The UN Human Rights Council ought to take lengthy overdue motion by investigating Chinese language authorities abuses in Xinjiang and past.”

The grasp record analysed by HRW is a part of a wider 52GB trove of paperwork from a Xinjiang police database that was leaked to the Intercept, a US-based media outlet, in 2019, however not made public till now.

Chinese language police within the Xinjiang capital Urumqi have required residents to obtain an app referred to as Jingwang Weishi, which supplies authorities the power to watch the contents of their cell phones. Guests to Xinjiang will also be required to obtain the same app referred to as Fengcai.

Whereas police formally monitor for “extremist” materials, HRW mentioned an evaluation of the police database means that, in lots of instances, ethnic Muslims are flagged as supporters of violent extremism for merely practising or exhibiting curiosity of their faith.

An evaluation of 1,000 recordsdata flagged by police in 11.2 million searches of greater than 1 million telephones between 2017 and 2018 confirmed that 57 p.c of the content material recognized as problematic was extraordinary non secular materials, HRW mentioned.

Simply 9 p.c of the flagged recordsdata contained violent content material and 4 p.c contained content material calling for violence, based on the rights group.

A leaked record of two,000 detainees at a re-education facility in Aksu prefecture in 2018 confirmed that 10 p.c had been detained for downloading “violent and terrorist” multimedia or having a connection to somebody who downloaded it, HRW mentioned.

Uighur and different Turkic Muslims are topic to heavy surveillance as a part of the Chinese language Communist Get together’s efforts to eradicate cultural, linguistic and spiritual variations from the nation’s majority Han tradition.

Rights teams estimate that greater than 1 million folks have been detained in re-education camps – known as “vocational coaching centres” by authorities – in recent times underneath the marketing campaign, which was launched after a collection of bombings and knife assaults in Xinjiang within the 2000s.

After launching the “Strike Onerous Marketing campaign towards Violent Terrorism” in 2014, Beijing escalated its efforts to incorporate mass surveillance by way of biometric information assortment, policing apps and facial recognition know-how.

Beijing has denied committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang and defended its re-education centres as necessary instruments to fight violent extremism and alleviate poverty.