Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to give my last speech of the year that's not on legislation where I get to actually determine the subject matter that I might discuss, and I promised myself earlier in the year that I would give a speech about the plight of the Uighur people before Christmas came. I do that mindful that I am a person who lives in a democracy where freedom of religion is absolutely my right. And it's in democracy that we find an expression of one of the core beliefs that Christianity delivered into the world—and I am a Catholic—and it's that notion of equality, the common dignity of every human person. Other people find in other faiths and from no faith ways to express their belief in egalitarianism and freedom and fraternity, but people who will be celebrating Hanukkah and Christmas have particular languages around faith that we are free to use—words that enhance my life and I'm proud to bring to my role here in the parliament. But there is no freedom for a particular group of brothers and sisters in this world who are in the People's Republic of China, and I speak of the mass detention, surveillance, forced sterilisation and torture of the Uighur population of north-west China.

The People's Republic of China has enacted the largest incarceration of an ethnic or religious minority since the Second World War. While this crackdown was purportedly launched on the flimsiest claims of stopping terrorism and extremism, it has instead become a cruel and brutal expression of state terror and cultural and religious genocide.

For those listening to this debate in the Australian Senate today, as we approach Christmas in the year of 2020, this is a shocking tale, and the truth is many Australians will not know that this is happening. For those who haven't heard about the Uighurs, they are a Turkic-speaking minority group who predominantly reside in the north-west Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang.

There are around 11 million Uighurs in China, and international observers now estimate that up to two million, nearly 20 per cent of the entire population, are now in re-education camps or jails. The Chinese government has repeatedly barred international observers and journalists from visiting the region and consistently lied about the internment camps until satellite photos uncovered their insidious and startling growth. This campaign to forcibly assimilate the Uighur culture is being carried out in silence and with brutality while China wields its economic might to silence any nation or people that may dissent.

I have seen the drone footage of hundreds of Uighurs being led onto trains, blindfolded, shaved and in prison uniforms. I'm imprinted in my own Catholic education by teachers who made sure that we didn't look away from the Holocaust. How similar are the images of people being herded into train cars and taken away from the places in which they have a right to live. These appalling images corroborate the stories of those on the ground—of Uighurs and other minorities such as the Kazakhs who have managed to flee the terror in Xinjiang.

In the PRC, the outward signs of citizens who are deemed to be showing extremism are frankly ridiculous. Some things as simple as travelling abroad, not smoking or drinking, growing a beard, having a foreign social media account or praying are worthy of detention in jail. Many detainees who undertake these simple practices are forced to work in intensive labour camps to produce goods for Chinese export while also being forced to recant their culture and their faith.

The mass internment has been accompanied by a cultural genocide designed to suppress the Uighur culture and traditional practices. The Uighur people are predominantly adherents of the Islamic faith. The destruction of dozens of Uighur graveyards and religious sites, the banning of the Uighur language in Xinjiang schools, and the blacklisting of Uighur books, films and music are calculated moves by the CCP—the Chinese Communist Party leadership—to erase the entire Uighur culture. Uighur children are being fined the equivalent of about A$40 for speaking their language at school. Sitting on the floor in a traditional manner is banned. The wearing of headscarves and long dresses is prohibited, and any government employee who speaks Uighur is promptly fired. This is an outrage. It's something so deeply unfamiliar to Australian citizens that it's hard for us, in our democratic country, to believe that such practices are going on in this time, in a place that's not that far away.

Chinese officials are now even forcing Uighur women to take birth control or be forcibly sterilised. According to a recent Associated Press report, at the same time as forcing that restriction on Uighurs, the state is encouraging Han women to have more children. The report shockingly revealed:

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands … Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

Birth rates in the Uighur communities have plummeted 60 per cent between 2015 and 2018 and by a further 24 per cent in 2019. Uighur children are being taken from their parents and indoctrinated in preschool camps with prison-style walls, surveillance and electric fences where they're raised completely separately from their Chinese counterparts. The enforcement of these abominable practices is widespread. Uighur parents are often threatened with jail for having too many children. They're constantly monitored by invasive fertility tests and surveilled constantly on the streets and in their homes.

This is a slow, creeping genocide as outlined by article 2, sections (c) through (e), of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as the Chinese state is:

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The People's Republic of China is signatory to this convention of the United Nations, and I urge them—indeed, I implore them—to live up to their obligations and stop the persecution of the Uighur people.

The People's Republic of China cannot live up to its true potential as a nation while it continues to commit these crimes. It's a stain that will last for generations. It will be forever tied to the current leadership of Xi Jinping. I urge the PRC leadership to end the persecution of the Uighurs and allow these people their basic freedom to practise their culture and religion as they deem fit.

All that it takes for evil to prevail is for good men and women to look away. We cannot look away, condone or tolerate such calculated brutality and oppression of cultural and religious freedom. To ignore the plight of the Uighurs would send a signal to every nation around the world that Australia doesn't care about human rights so long as its powerful trading partner is trampling on them. We must speak out against this. More importantly, we must act. That is why, in my Christian message here for the Australian parliament, at Christmas, I'm saying to the Uighur people: 'I see you. Australia sees you, and we will not look away.'

Australia was among the 22 countries which signed a joint statement to the UN Human Rights Council calling on China to stop detaining Uighurs. I commend the government for that important statement, but Australia must go further in its actions to stop the genocide. I know that the United States Congress has passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. It is currently debating the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would boycott goods made in labour camps, sanction Chinese officials that have participated in this vast campaign of surveillance and detention, freeze Chinese US based assets and restrict access to visas.

I note recommendations in a recent bipartisan parliamentary inquiry into the Magnitsky sanctions here in Australia, which offer a way to advance the discussions about the important matter with the PRC. As Nobel Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said:

When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.

My Christmas prayer is for our—