The United States House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a legislation demanding sanctions on Chinese officers who are behind the oppression of Uyghur Muslims.
The bill has been sent to the white house awaiting president signature to become effective.
The Uighur Human Rights Act passed a 413-1 came hours after Mike Pomp, Secretary of State disclosed to the Congress that the administration has ceased considering Hong Kong as autonomous from Beijing.
The bill calls for sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for the oppression of Muslim groups and Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province.
Uyghur community has over the years been forced into what the Chinese Communist Party called re-education camp in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in China that borders the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
Chen Quanguo, the region’s Communist Party secretary, a member of China’s powerful Politburo was particularly singled out for being behind the gross human rights violations against the Uighurs.
While speaking in support of the bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat said, “Beijing’s barbarous actions targeting the Uighur people are an outrage to the collective conscience of the world.”
Michael McCaul who is the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee also accused China of what he called “state-sponsored cultural genocide.”
Beijing is out to completely “eradicate an entire culture simply because it doesn’t fit within what the Chinese Communist Party deems ‘Chinese,” McCaul added.
“We can’t sit idly by and allow this to continue… Our silence will be complicit, and our inaction will be our appeasement,” he said.
He urged the congress that urgent actions are needed to be taken about the oppression of Uighur people to avoid being complicit in China’s violation of human rights.
