The US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved legislation calling for sanctions on Chinese officials deemed responsible for the oppression of Uighur Muslims, sending the bill to the White House for President Donald Trump to veto or sign into law.
The Uighur Human Rights Act passed by a 413-1 vote on Wednesday and came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pomp notified Congress that the administration no longer considered Hong Kong autonomous from China.
The bill calls for sanctions against those responsible for the repression of Uighurs and other Muslim groups in China’s Xinjiang province, where the United Nations estimates that more than a million Muslims have been detained in camps.
It singles out the region’s Communist Party secretary, Chen Quanguo, a member of China’s powerful Politburo, as responsible for “gross human rights violations” against them.
“Beijing’s barbarous actions targeting the Uighur people are an outrage to the collective conscience of the world,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, told the house in support of the bill.
The message was bipartisan, with Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accusing China of “state-sponsored cultural genocide”.
Beijing is out to “completely eradicate an entire culture simply because it doesn’t fit within what the Chinese Communist Party deems ‘Chinese’,” McCaul said. “We can’t sit idly by and allow this to continue… Our silence will be complicit, and our inaction will be our appeasement.”
