ICC Prosecutor Rejects Uighur Genocide Complaint against China

International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors have dismissed calls by exiled Uighurs to prosecute China for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity, as a blow to the Muslim-minority community in Xinjiang, reports AFP.

The Uighurs handed over a large dossier of evidence to the court in July, accusing China of locking more than one million Uighurs and other mainly Muslim minorities in re-education camps and forcibly sterilizing women.

But the office of prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a report on Monday that it was unable to act because the alleged acts happened on the territory of China, which is not a signatory to The Hague-based ICC.

In its annual report, Bensouda’s office said: “This precondition for the exercise of the court’s territorial jurisdiction did not appear to be met with respect to the majority of the crimes alleged”.

There was also “no basis to proceed at this time” on separate claims of forced deportations of Uighurs back to China from Tajikistan and Cambodia, the ICC report said.

The Uighurs had argued that even though the alleged deportations did not happen on Chinese soil, the ICC could act because they happened on Tajik and Cambodian territory and both of them are ICC members.

Lawyers for the Uighurs had now asked the court to reconsider “on the basis of new facts or evidence”, the ICC prosecutor’s report said.

China called the allegations baseless and said that the facilities in the northwestern Xinjiang region are job-training centers built to keep people away from hardline views.

According to accounts and testimonies, more than a million Uighurs are being held against their will in separate facilities in Xinjiang. Human rights groups and former prisoners call them concentration camps.

The ICC has no obligation to consider the complaints lodged with the Prosecutor, who will decide individually on what cases to bring before the Court of Justice, formed in 2002 to bring justice to the most serious criminals in the world.