China rejects claim it has put a million Muslims in camps

CHINA has vehemently denied allegations that one million of its mostly Muslim Uighur minority are being held in internment camps. It insists that all its ethnic groups are treated equally.

A Chinese official told a UN human rights committee in Geneva that tough security measures in China’s western Xinjiang region were necessary to combat extremism and terrorism, but that they did not target any ethnic group nor restrict religious freedoms.

“Xinjiang citizens, including the Uighurs, enjoy equal freedom and rights,” Ma Youqing, the director of China’s United Front Work Department, told the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

One of the 18 committee members, Gay Mcdougall, had earlier cited reports from rights groups that more than a million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities are being held in counter-extremism centres, while another two million “have been forced” into re-education camps.

China has recently intensified a crackdown in Xinjiang against what it calls Islamic extremism.