A leading Uyghur activist has accused the Labour government of “falling behind” its allies in failing to stand up to China, after ministers backtracked on plans to push for formal recognition of the country’s treatment of the minority group as genocide.
Speaking after David Lammy’s first visit to China as UK foreign secretary, the human rights activist Rahima Mahmut, who has lived in exile in the UK since 2000, said she had hoped there would be a shift in UK policy once the party came into power, including following the US in declaring a continuing genocide in Xinjiang.
“The Conservative governments all those years [had] big words but very little action,” said Mahmut, who is the UK director of the World Uyghur Congress. She has long campaigned against the crackdown on Uyghurs, which several governments and human rights bodies have described as a genocide.
“But, sadly, after Labour came into power I didn’t even hear big words,” she added. “I am very, very disappointed, the community is very disappointed.”
Since 2017, China has swept an estimated 1 million Uyghurs and other minority groups into internment camps, which it called training centres. Hundreds of thousands are believed to still be incarcerated, and in many cases families have no idea about the fate of relatives who had been detained.