Chinese authorities are carrying out forced sterilisations of Uighur and other ethnic minority women in an apparent campaign to curb the population, a study said Monday,…
Chinese authorities are carrying out forced sterilisations of Uighur and other ethnic minority women in an apparent campaign to curb the population, a study said Monday, triggering swift international condemnation.
China called the allegations baseless but the United States demanded an immediate end to the campaign described in the report, which was based on a combination of official regional data, policy documents and interviews with ethnic minority women.
China is accused of locking more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in re-education camps. Beijing describes the facilities as job training centres aimed at steering people away from terrorism following a spate of violence blamed on separatists.
Now a report by Adrian Zenz, a German researcher who has exposed China’s policies in Xinjiang, says Uighur women, among other ethnic minorities, are being threatened with internment in the camps for refusing to abort pregnancies that exceed birth quotas.
Zenz’s data-driven work — which uses public documents found by scouring China’s internet — on the camps has previously been cited by experts on a UN panel investigating the facilities.
Women who had fewer than the legally permitted limit of two children were involuntarily fitted with IUDs, says the report.
It also reports that some of the women said they were being coerced into receiving sterilization surgeries.
