China Acknowledges Re-Education Centers for Uighurs - WSJ
▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-acknowledges-re-education-centers-for-uighurs-1539191503
▻https://images.wsj.net/im-30236/social
Uighur security personnel patrolled near a mosque in Kashgar in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region in November.
PHOTO: NG HAN
Beijing had previously denied it was detaining members of the ethnic minority in centers, a campaign that has sparked an international outcry
BEIJING—China has retroactively changed the law to legitimize its detention of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs in a campaign that has sparked an international outcry over human rights abuses against the ethnic minority.
The amended counterterrorism regulations, adopted Tuesday in the northwest Xinjiang region where most Uighurs live, say that authorities can use “vocational skills training centers” to “deradicalize” people suspected of extremism. The previous rules made no reference to vocational centers.
The new rules appear to mark the first time China has acknowledged its use of vocational centers to detain Xinjiang residents for “transformation through education.” Senior Chinese officials have maintained—including before a United Nations panel in August—that the centers taught vocational skills to petty criminals. It had disputed reports the centers were used for “political re-education.”
The new regulations “establish a much more direct link between re-education and vocational skills training,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher on the Xinjiang camps at the European School of Culture and Theology in Germany.