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CCP Shifts Oppression of Uyghurs from ‘Reeducation’ to Prison, Analysts Say

Radio Free Asia

Two reports released by officials in Xinjiang — one by the region’s highest court, the other by a group of prosecutors — show the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) strategy for constraining the Uyghur population is shifting from so-called reeducation camps to prison.

The reports, published in March 2022 on the official website of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government, largely recite judicial statistics for the year. But scholars and analysts say the numbers represent a shift in strategy to use more official but still corrupt means to prosecute Uyghurs and other members of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang in northwestern China.

Public prosecutors, collectively known as the Procuratorate, detained or convicted more than 44,600 people in 28,490 cases involving about 12,900 crimes, Li Yongjun, who is the head of the XUAR People’s Procuratorate, told the fifth session of the 13th People’s Congress of the XUAR in January 2022.

Li noted that “the construction of a safe Xinjiang was effectively promoted.”

Chief Justice Bahargul Semet said that the region’s courts handled 668,900 cases in 2021. Of those, 606,200 were closed to public review. The top-level Supreme Court, meanwhile, took up 5,820 cases, 5,271 of which were closed.

German researcher Adrian Zenz, who has documented the CCP’s abuses against the Uyghurs, said the number of cases and investigations in Xinjiang courts has nearly doubled since 2018.

Along with the increase in Uyghur-language translations during trials, the statistics show that, “Beijing’s oppression in the region is shifting from mainly reeducation to sentencing large numbers of Uyghurs to prison terms,” Zenz said. “Uyghurs are not released from the camps, but instead shifted into prisons.

“Xinjiang continues to hide how many ‘criminals’ are sentenced each year,” he said. “It stopped reporting this figure in 2018. This unfortunately indicates that the state is concealing its strategy of shifting Uyghurs from reeducation camps to prisons to the outside world.”

Teng Biao, an academic lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, who is an expert on China’s judicial and legal systems, said that courts have become a tool of repression in Xinjiang.

Activists protest the Chinese Communist Party’s abuse of ethnic Uyghurs during a rally in Jakarta, Indonesia, in January 2022. REUTERS

Bahargul, the chief justice, said that courts operated by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a state-owned economic and paramilitary organization, handled 80,800 cases, 71,000 of which are now closed. The corps, which also is known as Bingtuan, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for its involvement in human rights violations against Uyghurs.

The CCP is believed to have held 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing claims that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has abused Muslims in the region.

The report from the People’s Court also noted the rise in court cases handled online.

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